2. CHAPTER 2 — THE CABIN #2
"The shoulder. You favor the right when you reach above your head, and you load the left leg to spare the right hip.
Same side, same height. That's not wear.
" She kept her voice flat, clinical, the voice she used over a bed when she wanted the truth and not the brave version.
"That's a through-and-through that took a while to come back from. "
For a moment he didn't move at all. The fire ticked. The dog lifted his head off his paws and looked between them, reading the change in the air, and lay back down.
"You a doctor," Jacob said.
"Nurse. Emergency." She held his eyes. "Eight months?"
Something crossed his face — surprise, and under it the smallest flinch, gone before it finished. "Closer to ten," he said. "You read a room."
"It's the job." It was the job. It was also that she had spent eleven years knowing to the day how long it had taken him to come back, because she had been the reason he'd gone down.
The number eight months had lived in her like a stone.
She had just watched him correct it to ten and felt the stone get heavier.
She turned to the basin so he couldn't read what she was reading.
"Sorry. Occupational habit. I diagnose furniture. "
"Don't apologize for being good at something." He said it simply, and then he let it go. He went back to the windows. He would not push, and the not-pushing was going to be the hardest thing about him.
"Bathroom's the outhouse," he said. "Take the dog if you go after dark. He'll walk you. Don't go past the woodpile."
"Understood."
She did the dishes because doing something with her hands was better than sitting, and he let her, which she noted — he didn't hover, didn't insist, didn't perform the gallant thing.
He banked the stove and walked the inside of the cabin once, checking the windows, pressing each one.
At the front door he stood a long moment with his hand flat against the wood, listening to the night.
She listened to chests for a living; she knew the posture on sight.
Then the generator coughed and quit on its timer and the cabin went to firelight and one battery lantern, and he turned the lantern down to a coal.
"Get some sleep," he said. "First night's the worst. They all get easier."
"You believe that?"
"No," he admitted. "But it's what you say."
That got the ghost of something out of her. "At least you don't lie smooth." She paused at the bedroom door. "Do you sleep? Really. Out here, one man, one dog, fifty miles of nothing."
"In pieces. The dog takes the deep watch. I take the surface."
"That's not sleep. That's a nap with a gun in it."
"It's gotten people to day twenty-one." He banked the coals. "Worry about your own rest."
"Occupational hazard. I worry about everyone's." She looked at him a moment in the dying light, something unreadable moving behind her face. "Goodnight, Marshal. Try to actually close your eyes. I'll hear the dog if the dog hears anything. I'm a light sleeper. We can split it."
He started to say no. Then he didn't, because she'd offered it like a colleague, not a charge, and he was too tired and too thrown to argue. "Surface watch is mine," he said. "But — thanks."
"Sure," she said, and went in.
She lay in the small bed in the small room with the door open and the dog a dark shape across the threshold, and she did not sleep.
She lay on her back and listened to him not-sleeping twelve feet away, the careful stillness of a man who slept in pieces.
She ran her hand once over the flat place under the mattress where she'd put the thing she'd carried out of Chicago and across eleven years and into this cabin.
The only proof. The thing the hearing turned on — the thing that would either set her free or get her killed depending on whether she lived to say it out loud.
He didn't know who she was. For tonight that was a mercy. In twenty-one days, in a room in St. Paul, under oath, he was going to find out the same time everyone else did, unless she found the nerve to tell him first.
She thought about the number. Ten months.
She'd had it at eight all this time. Eight because that was when the wire service ran the small follow-up item — the one she'd read forty times in a library in another city under another name.
Marshal injured in Chicago raid expected to recover.
Expected to. They never printed the part that came after expected to.
They never printed the two extra months.
She had spent eleven years rounding his suffering down, because rounding it down was the only way she'd been able to keep moving.
And he had just handed her the true figure across a basin of dishwater and gone back to checking windows.
Out past the log walls the woods ticked and settled in the cold. The dog's ears came up, and held, and came down. She watched the doorway until the firelight gave out, her hand on the proof. She waited for a morning she wasn't sure either of them was going to like.