Chapter 10
Asher
My father calls while I'm lacing my shoes by the door.
I almost let it ring out. I've got somewhere to be and no good reason I could give him for it. But the kid in me still answers when Dad calls. Always has.
"Asher." His voice is warm, even. The voice he uses with clients. "Caught you at a good time?"
"On my way out the door, actually."
"This won't take long."
It never does.
We do the rounds. How's the arm? How's the off-season? Am I ready for the next one? Did I see the thing my uncle sent about the cabin? I give him the answers he wants, leaning my shoulder into the doorframe, watching the elevator numbers change in the distance.
Then he pauses, and I brace myself for it. I already know where the conversation is headed.
"Marcus is retiring in the spring," he says. "Earlier than we planned."
Marcus. The managing partner. The man who runs the law firm with our family's last name on the building.
"That's good for Marcus," I say.
"It's good for the firm if the transition's smooth." He's silent for a moment before: "There's a seat, Ash. There's always been a seat for you. But seats don't stay empty forever, and you're not getting younger out there."
"I can still be a lawyer with gray hair. Nobody’s signing a forty-five-year-old shortstop.”
He laughs. He has a good, deep one. That’s what makes him hard to argue with. He's been certain about how my life will play out since before I could walk, and he makes it all sound so reasonable.
"I'm not asking for an answer today," he continues. "I just want you thinking about it. We can get you working your way up, fast. We both know you've got the mind for it." He lets that land, and I feel my teeth grind. "Whenever you're ready, Asher. That's all."
Whenever you're ready.
I've never figured out what that's supposed to mean. There's no morning coming where I wake up wanting his life instead of mine.
"I've got to run, Dad."
"Of course. Give my best to Nate and the other boys."
"I will."
I hang up before he can say anything else.
The drive to Millbrook is an hour, and the highway leaves me alone with the conversation the whole way.
I don't think about the firm. I think about her.
That's been the pattern for months now. Anything I don't want to look at, I set Audrey in front of it like a screen.
I park across the street in the shade of an overgrown maple, right on the property line between the two houses, as she requested.
It's the middle of a Tuesday. The kids are in school.
We don't have to whisper today, don't have to tiptoe up the stairs, and the freedom of that should feel like a gift.
She's bitten into my shoulder so many times, trying to drown out the noise. I know I'm eager to hear her actually scream. Scream my name, scream when she comes apart, scream right before her body floats back down.
I'm ready to give her that.
I pull my cap low and walk up the pathway. There's a neighbor two doors down watering his shrubs at noon for reasons known only to God.
I get to the porch, and the door stays shut.
That's new. She's always standing there, door open, before I even pass the neighbor's house.
Not today.
I knock. Twice. The way a man with a clipboard would, a man here to read a meter, and then I understand. Daylight. A car at the curb and a man at the door who knocks like business—that's a story the street can't make anything of. That's why she told me to park closer to the house this time.
The door swings open, and she's there in an apron over her clothes, flour up her arm, and the relief in her face is real, though it's tempered by something careful.
I lean in for her without thinking, just a quick kiss to say hello, but she turns her head and takes a step back. "Inside," she says, low. "Get inside first."
I cross the threshold. The door shuts behind me, and only when she turns the lock do her shoulders come down an inch.
That's when the bloody cat ambushes me.
It comes around the corner of the couch like a furred bowling ball and plants itself in the center of the entryway, tail up, staring me down with the flat contempt of something that has never once been told no.
"Demon spawn," I hiss, narrowing my eyes at it. "What the hell is Nora's fat cat doing here?"
Audrey gives me a look. She scoops the lazy thing up gently, as if the insult might reach it.
"Don't let Nora hear you call her that." Wanda drapes over her arm and gives up on life.
"I'm watching her because Nora and Nate are on vacation this week, so.
" She rubs her head before setting the cat down, and Wanda reclaims the exact square of floor she was just removed from. "It's only one more day."
"You hate cats."
That gets me a small shrug, one shoulder.
She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, and there's a streak of white on her wrist when she does it.
Flour. She's got it dusted up one forearm and a faint smudge near her jaw.
She hasn't noticed, and I'm not going to tell her.
She looks soft and lived-in and real in a way that I'm not used to, and I'm not going to stand in her entryway staring at her with that shedding menace judging us both.
"Come on," she says.
And just like that, the day tilts toward the reason I drove an hour.
We don't say much on the stairs. We've gotten good at the part where we don't talk about it, the careful distance we keep until a door closes.
She picks up a box I recognize on the foot of her bed, and on her way to the en suite she tips her head at the dresser.
"Yours is in the box on top."
The bathroom door clicks shut.
She told me she got me something after she got her package in the mail, but I didn't spend too much time thinking about it. I figured she ordered a sheriff's outfit or something straight out of an old Western. I open the box.
The laugh comes out of me before I can stop it, sharp enough that I hear her go quiet on the other side of the door.
It's a cop costume. Sort of. It's one of those police officer costumes you see at bachelorette parties—navy, a tin star, a hat, and a tight shirt that I'm fairly sure is designed to come off in one motion.
"This is what does it for you, huh?" I call through the door.
A tiny laugh answers me, just a breath of one. It does more to me than it has any right to.
"That's payback for this thing you got me," she says, muffled.
I pull the navy shirt on. It barely fits, snug against my biceps.
She continues. "This covers less than a swimsuit. How much did you even pay for it?"
I'm grinning at the door. "Probably more than I should have." I clip the plastic star to my chest, set the hat on my head, and catch myself in the mirror over her dresser.
The grin slips a little, because there it is. The one badge I'll pin on is a fake one, a joke, in a locked room an hour from my life.
Whenever you're ready, Asher.
A lawman. The only thing my father ever wanted for me.
I take the hat off. Put it back on. It's a stupid hat. That's the entire point of it.
The bathroom door opens, and I turn.
My mouth goes dry.
Red gingham, fringe, and a cowgirl hat tipped down over those eyes, the hem a joke, her legs going on forever beneath it.
She's got one hand on the doorframe like she's not sure she's going to go through with stepping out.
She doesn't know what she looks like. She never does. And it gets me every time.
"Worth every damn penny," I manage.
"Language." She says it under her breath, and a blush is already climbing up out of the gingham and under the brim of the hat.
And that's when I see it.
It's small. I'd miss it if I hadn't spent two months learning her face like a scouting report. There's a line between her brows. A tightness at the corner of her eyes, the smallest squint, like she’s staring into the sun. She's holding her shoulders higher than they should be.
I've seen this before.
I saw it the first day at Nate's, on the stool, before I knew her name, when she had her glass in a death grip and her smile bolted on over something. I noticed it then and didn't know what it was.
It's there again now.
She crosses the room toward me, reaching up, going for the kiss like she can outrun me noticing, and I let her get close, let her hand find the front of that ridiculous costume, and then I catch her wrist, gently. I bring it down.
"What's wrong?" I say.
"Nothing." She won't quite look at me. "You're supposed to read me my rights, Marshal."
"Audrey." I duck my head to find her eyes, and there it is, the squint, the flinch she's hiding. "You're not okay."
"I'm fine." She says it too fast.
"You've got a line right here." I touch the spot between her brows, barely, and she shuts her eyes when I do it. That's a tell. "And you look like you're about to combust." I try to keep my voice low, easy. "What is it?"
She breathes out. Her shoulders drop the way they do when she stops performing, and there's struggle there. I watch it cross her face—the relief and the embarrassment fighting it out.
"It's a migraine," she says finally. "I get them sometimes. Bad ones." She brings two fingers to her temple for a moment. "It's been building since this morning, and I thought I had it handled. I took something, but the light up here is—" She stops. "It's fine. We can still—"
"We're not doing anything." I grab both her hands now, holding them between us, and I make sure she's looking at me. "This can wait. I can wait. I drove an hour, and I'd drive it back home right now and call it a good day if it meant you laid down in a dark room and slept this off."
Something moves across her face. Surprise. Like that wasn't on the list of things she expected me to say.
I get it. I've spent a decade being the exact guy a woman doesn't call the next morning. The guy you have a good time with and don't expect anything from afterwards. I built that. I get why she's looking at me like I've spoken out of turn.
"You came all this way," she says quietly.
"I came to see you. You're seen. Mission accomplished." I tug her gently toward the bed, toward rest, toward recovery, hopefully. "You lie down. Let me see if we can cover the windows with something darker. I'll pay more for real blackout curtains than whatever your costume cost."
And she laughs—a real one, small but real—and then she does something strange.
She goes shy.
Not the same pink-cheeked shyness from the doorway. Something deeper. She pulls her hand out of mine and folds her arms across the gingham like she's cold, looking at the carpet, at the window, anywhere that isn't me.
"What?"
"It's—" She stops. Starts over. "Okay. Don't."
"Don't what? I didn't say anything."
"You're going to." She presses her lips together.
Her face has gone beet red to the roots of her hair, and her arms are wrapped so tight her knuckles have gone pale on her elbows.
"This is the most embarrassing thing I've ever said out loud.
So if you laugh, I might actually die, and you'll have to explain the cowgirl outfit to the paramedics. "
"I'm not going to laugh."
"You laugh at everything."
"Not at you."
Something in that lands. Her eyes come up, fluttering and quick, then drop again. She takes a breath like she's about to go underwater.
"The migraines," she says. "They started after Thomas—After he—." She goes quieter. "After. I didn't get them before. And nothing—I've tried everything—the medicine, the dark, the cold cloth thing—nothing stops them. They just have to burn themselves out, days sometimes, and I just—"
She stops. Her jaw works. I watch her decide whether to say the rest, watch her fight her way through the words.
"The only thing that's ever made one stop," she says, to the floor, barely above a breath. She can't finish it. She gestures, a small, helpless motion at the space between us, at the bed, at all of it. "Is this."
The word this catches on the way out.
For a second I don't move.
Because she thinks she's just confessed something humiliating.
A quirk. A thing to be ashamed of. She has no idea what she's actually handed me—that her body went dark the day she buried her husband and stayed that way for the better part of a year.
And the one thing that's switched a light back on is me.
Has been me since a locked bathroom at Nate's when she didn't even know my last name and reached for me anyway.
The protectiveness hits hard, the same swell I felt at the gate that first day watching her walk off and not knowing why it gutted me. I want to put my body between her and every dark thing that's ever found her.
And then, because I'm me, right behind it: the grin. I feel it find my face.
She catches it. Her eyes go wide. "Please say something."
"Doll face."
I reach up slowly and lift the cowgirl hat off her head, smooth her hair back, and turn her face away from the light leaking around the curtains. Enough that I watch the squint ease out of her eyes the second it's out of her line of sight.
I take the police hat off my head and set it on the nightstand.
Tip her chin up with one knuckle.
In the low light her face has already gone looser, the pain loosening its grip just from the dark and the closeness, and her breath has changed.
"Let me help."