Free The Horses of the Night by Michael Cadnum

said.
    â€œMoney’s a different matter altogether.” She stopped herself. “I’m worried about you. Look at your house. Naked pipes. Struts. This is supposed to be your dining room. Stratton Fields’s dining room. You’re a famous man. My place should be a mess. I need malpractice insurance. I need a secretary. You don’t need this. You have things on your mind.”
    She held me.
    I was used to keeping problems to myself. It was a family tradition. My cousin, the one with the African grays, had been kidnapped outside a casino. He had, family rumor had it, crushing gambling debts. Something went wrong, and negotiations went awry, or perhaps the kidnappers quarreled among themselves. The cousin was found in a suitcase in Lucca, cut into pieces.
    I told her the truth, as simply as I could. “I’m having a little financial trouble. A cash shortage.”
    She listened to my silence, as though she understood it more thoroughly than she understood my words. “You let things like that bother you?”
    â€œMy family has its secrets.” This was understatement, but Nona could read the most brief comment, the gesture, the nervous cough, and see exactly what was being said. I had discussed my family only in the vaguest terms, and Nona was not the sort of person to linger over ancient sorrows.
    â€œThe house doesn’t matter,” she said. “Money doesn’t matter. You matter. We matter.”
    The cup in my hand was empty, although still warmed by the just-finished tea. Nona took the cup from my hands, and she put it down beside her own empty cup on a dust-glazed side table.
    Nona had a way of curing one of my headaches by applying her fingertips very gently to what she called “acupoints.” These were points of her own discovery, I realized once while paging through a volume on acupressure. Her hands now found the pulse in my temple, the tension in my neck. Her fingers found the anxiety in me, and released it.
    We were upstairs again, and as we made love I felt the city around us expand and dissolve, Nona beneath me whispering my name until it was no longer a whisper, but a cry of discovery.
    I woke, remembering the sound of wings. This had happened to my mother, and now it was happening to me.
    Her voice had been so beautiful. My mother’s soprano was with me, as though, through the sound of Nona’s steady sleep, I could hear my mother. Just like years before. When I had heard her talk. I had worked so hard to forget.
    Surely everything would be fine. That was my strongest talent: faith.
    I stared upward, into the dark.

10
    She woke well before dawn, and she was into her clothes before I could fully stir.
    It was that special, freshest part of the day, morning before it has begun to be light. It was night, but a time of night that promises. I could not help myself—I lay there for a long moment enjoying her loveliness, her tousled dark hair even now catching, or creating, auras out of the virtually nonexistent light in the room. She dressed with very little sound, and the dark light made it look as though I imagined her entirely. She was a figure in a dream.
    â€œDo you have to leave so soon?” I asked.
    â€œI hate to. But I have to get to the hospital early,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about them every hour since I stepped onto the plane.”
    â€œI’m sure they missed you,” I said, and I meant: So did I.
    It was that simple: I wanted to be with her every day.
    â€œI have time to do everything I want to do,” she said, “if I stop eating and sleeping, and clone myself into about six different people.”
    â€œI can drop by the hospital for lunch.”
    She met my eyes. Her voice became serious, gentle. “The children would enjoy a visit. They like you.”
    â€œWould you like it?”
    â€œYou try eating lunch with a bunch of surgeons every day. All they talk about is golf and mutual