Such a Quiet Place: A Novel(31)

It wasn’t a roommate I needed in particular, but Ruby filled up the space with her things, her laughter, her thoughtfulness.

Ruby checked the right drawer on the first try, held up the corkscrew, and opened the bottle, pouring me a healthy portion. I took it from her hand, our fingers brushing.

“Now,” she said, with a crooked grin, “let’s see if I remember how to use a stove.”

This time I smiled, too. I went along with it, leaning into the awkwardness, the way she just embraced it, made it a part of her, didn’t try to fight it or pretend it didn’t exist—the opposite of Charlotte, in so many ways.

I took the glass of wine out back, sat in the Adirondack chair with the chipping white paint, watching the shade creep across the brick patio. Thinking about how the trial had painted her, the way they wanted to make her into a manipulative villain instead of someone fully formed. Who could be both generous and careless, fearful and feared.

Next door, I could hear the daily monotony of Tate and Javier’s dinner routine—banging cabinets, the rattle of a pan on the stovetop, Javier’s muffled voice. Whatever had happened yesterday, they seemed back on track today.

I curled my toes on the wooden stool, watching the bees darting from flower to flower in the mulched garden against the house. The far-right corner of the mulch bed was disturbed—Ruby was right, though it wasn’t obvious unless you sat at a distance. An abrupt gap between the flowers and the edge of the brick, the mulch between them dark and overturned.

When Ruby swung open the door a while later, her face was shiny, and the scent of garlic and oregano trailed after her. “Dinner is served,” she said with a flourish of her arm, beckoning me inside. She was brimming with nervous energy, watching for my expression as she led me past the kitchen.

She’d set the dining room table off the front foyer, which we never used. It ended up functioning as a holding area for mail or packages, usually. We typically ate at the kitchen table, or standing at the counters, or on the couch with plates balanced on our laps, wineglasses on the coffee table.

Now the chandelier looked like a candelabra, dimmed and atmospheric. Half the lights had burned out over time, and I’d never found the replacements, which gave the room a certain ambiance, shadowed and quiet.

“That’s you,” she said, pointing to the place setting against the far wall, without the wineglass. Her glass was poured fresh, next to her dish in the place beside mine, facing the front window. She had made shrimp and pasta, a salad, garlic bread. With intense formality, she gestured for me to sit first. She was watching me closely, every movement, waiting for my reaction.

“This looks really good, Ruby,” I said, and I meant it. It had been a long time since someone had cooked for me.

“I hope you’re hungry?” She said it as a question, and wasn’t it? Wasn’t this a test of some sort? Whether I believed she was a killer. Whether I believed she could become one. The ultimate question: Did I trust her?

Would I move the food around, looking closely? Would I chew tentatively, wondering at each bite what she would be capable of? Would I eat it?

Of course I would. I didn’t even wait for her to take a bite first, twisting the pasta around my fork, closing my eyes as I chewed. With Ruby, I knew, you were all in or you were nothing at all. “Oh, God,” I said around the bite, “it really is good, Ruby. Like, really fucking good.”

She smiled, her entire demeanor relaxing as she speared some lettuce on her fork. “You know what I missed the most inside? Being able to break from routine. Not just the big freedom—that’s not the worst. It was the little ones. They were harder to deal with than the bigger concept, honestly.” I saw her throat move, her eyes drift somewhere over my head. “Just the idea that I could cook dinner for someone…”

It took me a second to realize what she meant by inside. That she didn’t mean within her. She meant a place. A place where she had existed for fourteen months. And this, even cooped up with me, with the neighbors watching—this was out. She could finally do anything she pleased. Whether that was staying out a night without checking in, on a whim; buying a new outfit because she could. And could I fault her for that, really? Every day, a steady notch. An accumulation of weeks that became routine. Adding up to an unforgiveable passage of time.

Time to grow a child. For a child to grow teeth, learn to speak, turn from baby to toddler. To graduate and become an adult. And for us, time to decide on something. Come to terms with the truth—let it seep into your bones, gather weight, and become part of your understanding: Ruby was guilty. A jury agreed. We were right. All changes that were impossible to undo, in reverse.

I cleared my throat. “How did the meeting with the lawyer go?”

A pause. “Good,” she said. “And you? How was the meeting?”

I froze, then reached for my glass of wine, trying not to show how she shook me. How did she know about the meeting here? Had I mentioned it? Had she seen it on the message board somehow, logging in to my computer when I wasn’t looking? Had she spoken to someone else here?

But I felt my allegiance shifting in her presence. The wine, the food, the honesty. The words at the bottom of the television screen the day of her release: presumed innocent.

“As expected,” I said. “They’re starting a neighborhood watch.”

“Is that why I just saw Javier Cora walk by?”