Completely (New York 3)

But she didn’t open it. Nor did she text the New York editor. She couldn’t bear the thought of rousting herself from the bed and walking out into New York City to talk to a man she didn’t know about a book she couldn’t figure out how to write.

A book that had just been hit with an avalanche.

Rosemary opened the yellow email folder and started working her way down the list.

At nine, the doorman phoned to let her know there was a Kal Beckett to see her, and should he let him up?

“Yes, please.”

She answered the door in dirty climbing tights and an even dirtier T-shirt, unshowered, her eye sockets tight and her stomach churning around the tea in a way that told her she was working on a migraine.

“You look sharp.” Kal wore a blue dress shirt and black trousers. His shoes shone, recently polished. She touched her hand to her hair, dismayed not to have brushed it.

“Thanks. Can I come in?”

She stepped back, and he slid past her. He smelled clean and warm. She wanted to reach out with both arms and crush him against her body. “I would have called, but I thought…I don’t know.” He smiled. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“I’m well, thank you.” She heard how stiff the words were and tried to soften them with, “How are your…things?”

Kal ran his hand up the back of his neck. “You saw the news, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“Not so great.”

“No.”

She saw the same thing she felt in his eyes—the same desperate grief, the same physical exhaustion, the same hopeless casting about for what was supposed to be next when there was no script to follow anymore.

“I wrote emails all morning,” she blurted. “I haven’t showered.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’m working on a monstrous headache, and they’ve only stale black tea to drink, which isn’t going to touch it.”

“I wondered if you wanted to go to a service with me. Not a service, more like a prayer vigil. It’s at the monastery out in Elmhurst.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know if it’s your thing. It’s Buddhist, the monastery. They’ll be going all day, chanting and doing offerings at the altar. They always do it when there are deaths on Everest, because there are so many Sherpa with connections who live around there. I thought we could swing by for a while, maybe it would be good for us both.”

“Yes,” she said again. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to. Is there time for me to…” Rosemary looked down at herself.

She should leave these reeking, ruined clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and come back later with a match and a can of gasoline to finish them off properly.

“Yeah, we’ve got time. However long you need. If you want, I could go out and grab you a coffee.”

“That would be heaven.”

She gave him her order and let him out, then called down to the doorman to send him back up when he returned.

The hot water felt better than doing email, better than lurking in the empty apartment alone, and Rosemary gave herself a stern lecture to always remember that when she felt blue, it helped to make herself go out among people. She’d never been one to thrive shut up at home alone.

She shaved her legs and armpits, toweled herself dry and rubbed lotion into her skin, made herself shiny and clean and new on the outside, because it was something she could do.