Chapter 20
Ben
I didn’t know what time it was when I surfaced.
Late. The house had that weighted stillness that only came in the deep hours, when even the structure itself seemed to have settled.
No hum from the dishwasher. No traffic outside.
Just the quiet and Kayla’s breathing beside me, slow and steady, her back rising and falling in a rhythm that my own body had unconsciously matched.
She was on her stomach, face turned toward me, one arm tucked under it. Her hair was spread in a halo around her on the pillow. The hallway light was still on from when we’d come down the hall, throwing a narrow band of gold across the bedroom floor that caught the edge of the bed and stopped.
I lay there and let myself look at her.
I’d spent most of my adult life training my mind to run constant assessment. Threat vectors, exit points, environmental shifts, the dozen small calculations that happened below conscious thought and kept me and Jolly alive.
That engine never shut off. Not during downtime. Not during sleep. Not during any of the brief, uncomplicated encounters I’d had with women over the years, where the distance between us was something I maintained on purpose and they accepted without knowing they’d accepted it.
With Kayla, the engine had stopped. Not gradually, not in stages. It had just gone silent, somewhere between the hallway and the bedroom, and what replaced it was nothing I had a framework for.
I’d been fully present in my own body in a way that had nothing to do with discipline or control. Every sound she made, every shift of her hips, every place where her skin pressed against mine had registered not as data but as something I felt all the way through.
That had never happened before. Not once, in thirty-four years.
Kayla stirred. A small shift, her shoulder rolling, her hand sliding across the sheet until her fingers found my arm. She didn’t open her eyes. Her hand settled against my skin and stayed there, and I watched her face for the moment when sleep let go and consciousness came back.
Her eyes opened. Focused on me. And whatever I’d been bracing for, whatever version of regret or careful distance I’d half expected to see, wasn’t there.
She looked at me without the measuring. No quiet arithmetic running behind her expression, no calibration of how much to trust. Just her face, open and still, the way a space looked when someone had stopped rearranging the furniture and finally sat down.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“What time is it?”
“Late. Or early. I’m not sure which.”
She smiled. Slow, private, the kind that belonged to a room no one else was in. “Have you been awake long?”
“A while.”
“Doing what?”
“Thinking.”
“Dangerous.” She shifted onto her side to face me, pulling the sheet with her. “Thinking about what?”
“Food, mostly.”
She laughed. A real one, startled out of her, and the sound of it in the dark bedroom landed somewhere I wasn’t expecting. “Is that right.”
“You cooked an entire meal, and we didn’t touch it.”
She pushed her hair off her face. “We got distracted.”
“We did. The best kind of distracted.”
She held my gaze for a beat. The smile was still there, softer now. “It’s probably still salvageable.”
We got up to head downstairs. Kayla pulled a robe from the back of her bedroom door, and I found my jeans in the hallway where they’d landed a few hours ago.
The house was cool and still around us. She turned on the kitchen light, and the room came up in that yellow-toned glow, smaller than mine and full of the evidence of people actually living in it.
William’s Lego fortress was on the living room floor, half built and bristling with tiny figures stationed at the ramparts.
A crayon drawing was taped to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a dog bone.
The drawing showed a stick figure boy and a four-legged creature with pointy ears and a tail that took up a third of the page.
Below it, in wobbly first-grade letters: ME AND JOLLY.
I stood in front of the fridge for longer than I should have.
Kayla was at the stove, transferring the pasta and sauce into a pan. She’d made more than enough. The salad was in a covered bowl in the fridge, and she handed it to me as she reached past for something else, the gesture automatic, domestic, like we’d done this a hundred times.
My kitchen had a counter, a coffeemaker, and a stack of takeout menus in a drawer. The walls were bare. The only personal item in the entire house was Jolly’s bed in the living room, and even that was military-grade, designed to be rolled up and transported.
Kayla’s kitchen had herbs growing in small pots on the windowsill. A corkboard near the phone was pinned with school notices, a dentist appointment card, and a grocery list in her handwriting. Three of William’s drawings.
A home. Not just a house.
The microwave hummed. Kayla set two plates on the counter and divided the pasta between them. She dressed the salad with oil and vinegar, the quick, efficient movements of a woman who’d been feeding people on a timeline for years. She slid a plate in front of me and sat on the stool beside mine.
We ate. The pasta was good. Simple red sauce, not trying to be anything other than Tuesday night dinner, and after the gas-station burritos and the cold pizza and the parade of takeout that had defined my eating habits since I’d arrived in Summit Falls, it was outstanding.
“This is really good.”
“It’s pasta.”
“You keep saying that about your food. The chicken was just chicken and rice. This is just pasta. You’re not great at taking compliments.”
She twirled her fork. “I’m fine at taking compliments. I’m just realistic about my cooking. It’s functional, not inspired.”
“Functional is underrated.”
“Spoken like a man who’s been eating out of Styrofoam containers for a month.”
“Longer than a month.” I took another bite. “Try years.”
She set down her fork and looked at me. “Years?”
“I move a lot.” I shrugged. “Contract work doesn’t come with a kitchen. Or it does, but you’re not there long enough to buy groceries.”
“Where were you before Summit Falls?”
“El Paso. Before that, a contract in Virginia. Before that, overseas.”
“How long have you been doing this? The Citadel work?”
“Six years. Since I left the Army.”
She pulled one foot up onto the rung of her stool, angling toward me. “What made you enlist?”
“Small town. Eastern Montana. Not much there.”
She waited. Didn’t fill the silence. She was good at that.
“My parents ran a feed supply store. Good people. Quiet.” I turned my fork on the plate. “I lived in the kind of house where nobody yelled, but nobody said I love you either. You just showed up and did your part, and that’s how everyone knew things were fine.”
“Do you see your parents regularly?”
“A couple times a year. We talk on the phone when there’s something to talk about, which isn’t often.” I shrugged. “It’s not bad. It’s just how we are.”
“Any siblings?”
“Nah. It was just the three of us.”
She didn’t push. Didn’t offer sympathy or fill the silence with something I didn’t need. She just listened, the way she listened to William when he was working up to saying something important.
“So you left,” she said.
“At eighteen. Didn’t have money for college, didn’t have a plan, and staying felt like the walls were closing in. Recruiter in Billings said the Army would fix all three.”
“Did it?”
“The structure worked for me. I knew where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do, and nobody expected me to make small talk about it.”
“And then K9s.”
“And then K9s.” The words came easier now, the way they always did when I talked about the dogs.
“I watched a handler demonstration during training, and that was it. I knew. The bond between that dog and his handler was the most honest thing I’d ever seen.
No performance. No politics. Just trust, trained into muscle memory. ”
“You were good at it.”
“I was good at the dogs. The people part took longer.”
“Two tours in Afghanistan.” She said it carefully, not like a question but like she was setting the words down gently to see how much weight they could hold.
“Two tours. Donovan was there for both. That’s where we became close.
” I didn’t elaborate on what the tours had contained.
Not because I was protecting her, but because the details lived in a place I didn’t open casually, and she seemed to understand that.
“After the Army, Ethan Cross recruited me for Citadel. Private security, K9 operations, contracts all over the map. It suited me. No permanent address, no long-term anything. Just the next job and Jolly.”
“When did Jolly come along?”
“Seven years ago. He was eighteen months when we were matched.”
“Love at first sight?” The corner of her mouth lifted.
“I don’t know about love. But I knew within the first hour that he was different. Most working dogs are driven. Jolly’s driven and happy about it. The tail, that grin. He does the hardest work I’ve ever asked of a dog, and he looks like he’s having the time of his life.”
“He is having the time of his life,” Kayla said. “You can see it.”
“He’s the longest relationship I’ve had.” I said it plainly, because it was true and because the humor in it didn’t require decoration. “Seven years. No one else comes close.”
She smiled, but it was the kind that carried something heavier underneath. “Is that why you took this contract? Training instead of fieldwork?”
I nodded. “Jolly’s almost nine. That’s getting up there for a Malinois-shepherd mix.
Working dogs have a window, and his is starting to close.
He’s still sharp. Still loves the work. But I can see the edges of it.
He’s half a step slower on the sprints than he was two years ago.
Takes longer to bounce back after a hard day.
A year from now, maybe less, a vet is going to tell me it’s time to retire him. ”