CHAPTER ONE
Zoe closed her eyes, tilting her head to lean against the back of the sofa. It didn’t matter either way. Outside her open curtains, darkness had fallen over Bethesda, and she hadn’t bothered to get up to turn the lights on. In the distance, yellow pinpricks in the skyline told her that Washington, D.C., was still awake, and she was tired of staring at them.
That was not her world anymore. All she saw when she looked at it were the numbers: the floors in every building and how many windows they had, the distance from the ground, the amount of time it would take a falling object to hit the sidewalk from any given window. The number of buildings, the divisions of streets and the angles at which they intersected each other, around and around in her head, until all she wanted to do was bury herself in darkness and shut it all out for good.
And then, with her eyes closed, her other senses would take over. The seconds ticking audibly from her watch, which she had days since taken off and thrown across the room so that she would not be able to hear it anymore. She could still count them. Even the bubbles popping from inside the bottle of her beer began to take on a pattern of their own: calculating the time between pops, the volume left in the bottle, the velocity of the bubbles’ movement when she squinted at the liquid in the half-light.
Zoe took another swig, thinking that finishing the bottle would serve two purposes: one, removing the popping bubbles from her immediate vicinity, and two, dulling her senses. Maybe the next bottle would not pop quite so loudly.
One of her cats, Euler judging by the particular sound of his delicate claw-grips in the fabric, eased himself casually along the back of the sofa and spread out behind her, making almost no noise as he settled his furry warmth against her short-cropped dark hair. But he did make noise. He had a heartbeat, a breathing rhythm. As quiet as they might be, they were there, and with everything else shut out, Zoe knew she would soon begin to count them.
She stirred slightly, reaching for her cell phone. It lay uselessly on the arm of the sofa, turned off. She hadn’t turned it on in days. At the beginning, when she first came home from the case that had gotten her suspended, she had left it on. There had been messages, notifications, alerts, all ringing and buzzing and annoying the hell out of her until she switched it off. Then she would turn it on once a day, read the messages, turn it off. Now she didn’t even want to do that. It was too much.
Zoe wasn’t expecting anything new anyway. She had cut everyone off, shut them out, and over the weeks they had stopped trying. There would be nothing from work—after she had badly beaten the murderer who took the life of her partner, Special Agent Shelley Rose, SAIC Maitland had had no choice but to send her home. Not before she’d solved the case, and she took grim satisfaction in that. Not that it was enough. She’d still let it happen.
Let him kill Shelley right under her nose.
Zoe shifted her weight on the sofa, staring at the phone, calculating its dimensions, weight, the outline of each button on the side. Even the numbers were better than thinking about that.
And it wasn’t just the FBI who weren’t contacting her anymore. Zoe had been dating John for long enough to start trusting him, to think about telling him about the numbers; she’d even planned it, set a date. But after Shelley’s death, there didn’t seem to be any point in seeing him again.
He’d called daily at first. Then texts, three a day, two a day, one a day. They had petered out rapidly, until John stopped trying. He’d sent her a message that she had by now memorized: I’ll be here if/when you want to talk.
Nine words. Thirty-eight characters. And that was the last message he had sent, twenty-seven days ago. Zoe knew without looking, because her internal clock wouldn’t stop counting, that it was a few hours away from being twenty-eight. Each day slipped away with the same intolerable length, an equal measurement stretching out behind her and in front of her, the same thing over and over again for as far as she could see.
Zoe was reaching for her second beer of the night when she flinched hard, almost dropping it on the floor. The knock on the door was forceful, numbers instantly flashing through Zoe’s head: the weight of the fist doing the knocking, the velocity, the force. And she knew, without a doubt, who was attached to that fist.
“Zoe?” The voice floated under the door and through the quiet apartment, too loud. Dr. Francesca Applewhite had come by almost every one of the twenty-seven days since John’s last text, and every day before that, too. Thirty-six knocks on the door. Given that Dr. Applewhite almost always knocked in a pattern of four raps—one, one-two, one—that was one hundred forty-four individual knocks, impacts on the frame, on Dr. Applewhite’s knuckles.
And Zoe had never opened the door once.
“Zoe, I just want to hear your voice,” Dr. Applewhite said. “Just let me know that you’re okay.”
Zoe’s eyes slid closed. Dr. Applewhite’s voice came through the door at sixty-five decibels, only slightly raised from normal speaking level. Just loud enough to be heard through the door. Through the apartment. There was nowhere Zoe could go where she couldn’t hear the voice calling through the door. It was too small of a space. She had tried.
“Zoe!”
Sixty-nine decibels. Zoe clamped her hands over her ears, trying not to hear the numbers anymore. “Go away!” she shouted, unable to stop herself. “Just leave me alone!”
There was a soft noise in the corridor outside. “All right, Zoe.” Sixty decibels. Low and calm. “I’m going now. Just call me if you need anything.”
There was a hesitant pause, a wait for a response. Zoe said nothing. Finally Dr. Applewhite’s footsteps walked away, Zoe tracing their path to the stairs, knowing from the sound that Dr. Applewhite still weighed one hundred twenty-nine pounds.
Zoe rubbed a hand over her eyes and took the beer out of the refrigerator. She cracked it open and took a long swig, draining as much of it as she could manage in one go. Almost exactly one-half, she noted as she measured the volume with her eyes. She turned to look at the sofa but did not move, the apartment seeming stiflingly close now, too small, too circular a space for her thoughts to rush around in.
She couldn’t stay here, not with the numbers, not for the whole of the rest of the night. She couldn’t listen to them echoing in her head with no response. They were everywhere, and even though she knew they were also out there, at least the numbers outside of the apartment would be new.
She waited seventeen minutes after the last of Dr. Applewhite’s audible footsteps to allow her time to be out of the neighborhood entirely, downed the rest of the second bottle of beer and threw it in the trash, and went to put on her shoes.
***
Zoe stumbled, almost tripping over a loose stone on the edge of the sidewalk. On closer inspection, it transpired that the stone was actually part of the sidewalk itself, an edging slab put in during construction. Well. They shouldn’t have put it there. Zoe straightened carefully, making sure not to wobble over again.
She looked up at the street and realized where she was with a sinking feeling: the same place she often ended up when she attempted to wander through the night after a few drinks. Or during a few drinks, since she had carried the rest of the six-pack with her, and now her hands were empty. It wasn’t exactly a short walk, which meant that she had deliberately come this way, even if she couldn’t remember actually making the decision. Still, here she was, right in front of that same house.