Page 94 of The Quiet Tenant

She must have spoken. Emily. The woman who found the key to his house, walked into his living room.

And now he knows.

CHAPTER 63

Cecilia

The thing about my dad: he’s nice, but I’ve always been…I don’t know.Scaredisn’t the right word. It’s just easy to get on his wrong side, and then good luck to you. It’s because we’re too similar, my mom used to say. Two strong personalities. Both of us with our likes and dislikes and no room for compromise.

I don’t know why my mom thought that. I compromise all the freaking time.

I guess it was nice of him to let me keep the dog, though. We don’t have all that much money anymore. And he doesn’t have all that much free time. It was a nice thing he did, and he did it for me. Thanks to Rachel.

Rachel.

Okay, so, Rachel is super weird. But I like her.

This sounds so lame. But she’s kind of a…friend?

She has all sorts of ideas about me and my life and my dad, that’s for sure. But at the end of the day, she’s not bad. She’s just been through some stuff, I guess, and when you go through some stuff, you’re allowed to be a little weird. And she saved Rosa. I’ll never forget that.

So I gave her one of my pins. It was nothing, but she liked the pins, and that was something I could give her. Plus I wanted her to get out of my room. I knew if I gave her the pin, she’d leave.

I like Rachel, but sometimes I also like to be alone. My mom used to tell me that was okay. She used to tell me it was another thing me and my dad have in common.

It’s nice to have a friend—if I can call Rachel that, and I’m not totally sure I can, because honestly, she’s kind of old—but it’s also a problem.

It makes me feel like I can talk to her.

It makes mewantto talk to her.

It makes me want to tell her things I haven’t told anyone else.

CHAPTER 64

The woman under the house

You cannot leave. You’re not strong enough to run. But you can move, around the house and in the bedroom. You can do things when his daughter’s not looking. You can get ready.

What do you remember about moving your body? You search for memories from the times you were outside, running. Training plans, speed work on weekdays and long runs on weekends. Useless. What you need is the other part, the one you skipped so often because you were young and your body convinced you you didn’t need it. Cross-training. Movements that strengthened your legs, your back, your abdomen.

In the bedroom, once he’s gone, you try. The easiest things you remember: squats. One, two, three, ten. It’s a foreign sensation, the pulsing in your thighs, a burning at the back of your calves. Calves—calf raises. You try those, too. Your heart beats faster. For the first time in years, not in fear or anticipation. Your heart beats faster because the rest of your body tells it to.

Everything about this belongs to you. Your limbs and the things you make them do. The curve of your lower back against the floor as you lie down for crunches. The soreness in your biceps when you hold the paperback ofItat arm’s length—it’s the thickest in your collection and still it doesn’t weigh much, but you hold the position long enough to start a fire in your shoulders. Also yours: the pain in your wrists when you try a push-up. The dryness inside your mouth, the stickiness at the back of your neck.

By the time he returns, sweat will have dried off your clothes. Heat will have cooled off your cheeks. He will not know. Even if you do it again the next day and the one after that. This will remain yours and yours alone.

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WHEN YOUR ARMSstart shaking and your legs beg you for a break, you go back to the basement. Jimmy the lock with the safety pin. A million times, you expect it to fail you. A million times, the safety pin proves you wrong. You put it in your back pocket and carry on.

You find the gun. You can’t tell if it’s loaded. You don’t know where the safety is. Should you be able to tell? You have no idea. All you know about guns is what you learned from movies, but even you know movies get it all wrong. In real life, you’ll miss your target if you’re out of practice; in real life, you have no idea what you’re doing.

You riffle through the box, move a hammer out of the way, a hunting knife, ski gloves, a length of rope. You find stubby rectangles of black metal, one, two, three. Magazines. Bullets gleaming at the top, through holes on the sides. You can’t tell if it’s a lot of ammo or a little. All you can do is hope it’ll be enough for whatever you end up doing.

If you had a phone or a laptop, you’d look everything up. In the span of a video tutorial or two, you’d learn how to load the gun. Could probably learn to shoot, too, how to aim and when to pull the trigger and how to steel yourself against the recoil.

You’ll have to learn by yourself. You know nothing, but it’s a gun, not quantum physics. You’ll have to come back and figure things out.

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