Chapter 14 Deacon
DEACON
Cruz gives it to me straight and quiet, like a medic handing off a patient he already stabilized.
A folded parchment from the cake this morning. Another message later in the pantry, tucked among cinnamon sticks, this time passed to me by Marisa.
Two different places. Same rot.
I don’t talk. Talking scatters focus.
I slide the first note into a zip-top evidence pouch from the clubhouse kit and push all the air out until the plastic clings like a second skin.
Black Sharpie across the top: KITCHEN CAKE—AM. I label the cinnamon one PANTRY—LATE AM and snap both into the hard case we keep with the first aid.
My brain paces in a tight loop like a shepherd behind a weak fence; my hands keep it from chewing the door.
“Door latches were set,” Cruz says, eyes on me, voice easy for the room and not easy at all for me. “No frost disturbance on the sill. Nothing obvious.”
“Nothing obvious is still something.” I don’t raise my voice. With men like us, the volume dial stays on low or something breaks you didn’t intend to.
The pantry is my first stop.
I breathe the room the way you walk a framing job—corners, seams, where the light sneaks through.
No pry marks on the door trim.
Hinge screws are still buried, paint undisturbed.
I run a flashlight along the jamb, see dust where dust should be, not a swipe, not a finger.
The floor shows a mess a good house should show: faint flour, sugar crystals like salt spray on old wood.
I drop to a knee and check the toe space under the bottom shelf. Spiders, crumbs, a lost Cheerio from a year ago, and—there—half-moon silver that doesn’t belong to cookware or sense.
I coax it out with the flat of my knife.
A button.
Not plastic. Nickel-silver, with a ridge and an undercut shank. Stamped sunburst pattern like a cheap saint’s medallion tried to be fancy and failed in a particular way.
I have seen this make before.
Not common.
A run that went around our part of the world for two seasons when a certain tailor did a favor for a certain crew.
We banned that hardware off our cuts when we broke charter and scrubbed anything that smelled like that history.
I turn it in my palm.
My husky brain wants to run—chase tracks, pull a sled, scream at the tree line.
I fold that urge under the shepherd’s order. Bag. Label. PANTRY FLOOR—BUTTON. I keep moving.
Back door hinge first.
It ticks on cold mornings; that’s a small tell the wrong ears could turn into a map.
I pull the pins, wipe them clean, work in graphite, reinstall.
The door swings and sighs like a throat that changed its mind.
Good.
The shelf Marisa bumped with her hip when she reached for sugar—second bracket had loosened from the plaster.
Two anchors.
Reset.
It doesn’t wobble when I lean my weight on it.
The loose tile behind the stove:
I pry it up, clean out the bed, reset it with thinset from the pantry hammer box, press until the squeeze-out beads like icing.
I will caulk it when the house is quiet. Fixing is prayer when you don’t have time to kneel.
The twins complain at a volume I can respect.
I wash my hands and step into their room.
Luca is trying to swallow his fist and failing with gusto. Gabe looks at me like I’m late to my own inspection.
“Afternoons are hard,” I tell them, picking Gabe up first because his eyebrows are louder.
I count breaths against my chest.
Fifteen in ten seconds.
Multiply by six.
Ninety. Fine.
He calms like he recognizes the math.
Luca gets a hand on my beard and clutches like a man rappelling. “You can’t yank the anchor, pal,” I inform him, and get a gummy smile for my trouble.
Marisa appears in the doorway in that big flannel like she stole it on purpose, eyes soft and wary both.
She reaches for Luca, hesitates. I offer him over. Her hands are steady now.
That steadiness matters more than any camera.
“You fixed the door,” she says. It’s not a question.
“I fixed the things trying to pretend they aren’t broken,” I say.
“Add my brain to your list,” she says, aiming for light and landing somewhere careful.
“It’s already on there,” I tell her, deadpan. It gets me the ghost of a real smile.
I leave her with the boys a minute and slip back to the hall where our security screen lives in a recessed cabinet behind cookbooks.
I pull up feeds.
North yard: snow-quiet, pine boughs carrying it like old men carry coats.
West ridge: lens frosted opaque—needs a glove and a breath and a defog wipe.
South porch: clear, timestamp ticking the way it should, except for the bad part.
I scrub back to last night.
The time counter jumps forward three minutes.
No drift. No glitch smear. A skip.
Like someone introduced a blank where a face should be.
I call it out of habit, not panic. “Cruz.”
He’s there with a dish towel slung like a priest’s stole. Roman behind him, mugs in hand that look too small for our problems.
“Feed jump,” I say, pointing. “South porch. Three-minute gap, clean.”
Roman’s jaw ticks. “Anyone besides us with a repeater that could spoof our clock?”
“If they touched our time source, we’d see other clocks wobble,” I say. “This is local. Somebody walked the blind, not the backbone.”
Cruz scrubs a hand over the back of his neck and does a quick scan of our real room, the way a medic checks for breathing even after the chest rises. “We’ll walk the lines again at dusk. I’ll take Hox. Wren can hang lights along the south fence.”
“Lights will make them feel seen,” I say.
“Good,” Roman says. He doesn’t raise his voice either.
I could stay glued to the screens and let my head invent, but it’s too easy to become bad company with a monitor for a lover.
I shut the panel, slide the bookshelf back, and rejoin the living, which is sticky and loud and exactly what we’re defending.
We prep dinner like a small army that knows the value of fat and heat. Marisa leads without announcing it.
Polenta gets the second life only yesterday’s patience can give.
Cruz sears sausage in a cast iron that remembers better summers.
Roman slices bitter greens with a contempt for stems I’ve learned to admire.
I poach eggs like a man who hates runny whites and refuses to serve them.
The twins ride the kitchen on a rotation of arms and slings.
I stir while I bounce a knee that persuades Luca the universe likes him.
Gabe watches the ceiling’s shadow play and frowns like he plans to lodge a complaint with management.
“Light over the sink is flickering again,” Marisa says, glancing up as if the house is misbehaving on purpose.
“It was waiting for you to ask,” I say, already at the cabinet.
I kill power at the switchplate I added last year, pop the trim, crimp a cleaner connection in a wire nut that someone with fewer opinions than me used in 1998, and seat it all back.
Switch on. Solid glow.
She exhales, leans into the square of steady light like a cat.
“Thank you,” she says.
I shrug like it’s nothing and go find my towel.
I don’t say, You’re welcome for drawing a line against darkness we didn’t invite.
We eat at the long table.
Conversation tries out normal and gets tired quick.
Marisa’s voice has a brave lilt around the edges.
She watches our faces like she’s reading a forecast in the grain of wood.
Roman is quiet and watchful, a storm welded into a man.
Cruz serves seconds with the reverence of someone who knows how hunger works in more than one register.
I keep my eyes on the boys and my ears on the room.
Every clink, every laugh that doesn’t make it all the way, every sigh that thinks it’s hiding—data. I sort it without saying a word.
Gabe scowls through a hiccup.
I wipe slobber off his chin with a thumb and he tries to eat my thumb. “Open,” I instruct, and he does, and we get through it like people who have never read a book on parenting but could build a bridge from scratch.
Marisa catches me counting breaths again and doesn’t call me on it.
She cuts a soft-boiled egg in half and slides it onto my plate without asking.
I take it without thanking out loud because thank you will shake if I let it.
We do this strange, quiet dance around belonging and penance and polenta.
The lodge listens, old as iron and twice as stubborn.
When the plates are ghosts and the pan is soaking and the twins have entered their witching hour where both want everything at once, I take my chance.
“I’m grabbing the back room,” I announce to nobody in particular.
Roman lifts his chin a fraction.
Cruz is by the sink with a dish in one hand and a baby in the other, humming.
Marisa has Luca tucked against her shoulder, patting a rhythm on his back that is dangerously close to a heartbeat I recognize.
I go before I decide to stay and learn something I can’t unlearn.
The storage room is colder and smells like oil and cedar and the rubbed-metal tang of secrets.
I pull the false panel behind the gear chest—the one we built during the charter war when we learned the hard lesson about redundancy—and wake the burner laptop.
It pulls power from the private repeater I wired into the joist bay and not from anything a neighbor could sniff without burning their tongue.
First order: logistics.
A supply drop out of Albany flagged weather-delayed at noon.
I reroute it to the Deer Run layup so it doesn’t sit with two crates of mixed ammo and a hydraulic jack in some kid’s storage unit where the wrong cousin could get curious.
I ping the southern run.
Our courier hasn’t checked in.
I mark him MISSING—WEATHER with a time stamp generous enough to respect his pride and short enough to respect the miles.
Then the button.
I pull the pouch, take two photos in the light of a goose-neck lamp I trust not to lie, roll the image until the stamping catches the shadow.
I log into a board we swore we’d stop using the day we burned our old patch, then only kept for moments like this when old fires spit new sparks.
My handle still works.
My stomach doesn’t like that.
I tag the file with a phrase only the wrong people will read all the way through.
WHO LOST THIS SAINT’S EYE NEAR A CUPBOARD?
I add a second line: LOOKING FOR A GHOST WHO OWES US QUIET.
It’s bait and it’s a handshake.
You don’t write full names where men have bled.
You write a shape and wait to see who thinks it fits.
I sit with the hum of the repeater in my bones and the slip of wind under the door like a dog breathing at the threshold.
In the kitchen, faint—Marisa’s laugh, unsteady, brave.
Cruz’s low answer.
Roman’s shorter one.
The twins offering commentary like a Greek chorus with milk mustaches.
Night edges in.
The laptop throws a weak rectangle of light on the wall.
My husky brain paces; my shepherd brain sits.
We wait.
Nine minutes.
Fourteen.
Twenty-one.
The picture of the button pulls three views from handles I don’t recognize and one from a name that doesn’t belong to a man who ever wore our colors.
Ping.
The reply is short, the way a certain kind of threat is short when it knows you’ll read the rest in the margins: YOUR SAINT’S EYE BELONGS TO A MAN WHO DOESN’T USE HIS NAME ANYMORE. USED TO DRINK AT YOUR TABLE. BORROWED A CHURCH AND A JACKET. WALKING YOUR HILLS.