CHAPTER 26
WREN
I go out to him instead of letting him in.
That’s the whole decision, right there, the one I’ll turn over for the rest of my life: I open the door just wide enough for my own body and I step out onto the freezing porch and I pull it shut behind me, sealing the wolf inside my house and the good man out in the snow, and I do it without a half-second of hesitation, because somewhere in the last twelve years my hands learned whose side they’re on before the rest of me gets a vote.
“Hey.” Eli’s standing at the bottom of the steps in his off-duty coat, breath fogging, a flashlight he hasn’t turned on hanging from one hand like he’s embarrassed he brought it.
Snow’s collecting on his shoulders. He looks up at me and his decent face does a complicated thing, relief that I’m upright, then a flicker of something sharper, because I’m standing on my own porch in a t-shirt in nine degrees with no coat, hugging myself, and nothing about that says fine. “You’re not fine,” he says.
“I’m fine, Eli. I told you not to come.”
“Yeah, and then your porch light came on, which you told me yesterday you never do, light just tells the dark where you are, you said, and I’m a guy who notices things, it’s basically the whole job.
” He takes one step up. I take one step down, keeping the door at my back, and I watch him clock that too, the way I’m guarding it.
His jaw sets. His voice drops, careful, the voice you’d use on a spooked animal, and oh, I know that voice, I use it on dying lambs. “Wren. Is someone in your house.”
The truth is right there. All I have to do is let it fall.
There’s a deputy on my steps and a man who broke a protective order standing in my living room, and one sentence — yes, it’s him, it’s Lazarus, he’s inside, ends it.
They’d take him tonight. Back through the door that closed for six years. I’d be free of him.
And the truth would unspool from there like wire off a spool, because Lazarus would have nothing left to protect, and the music box is on my counter, and the only thing standing between me and a cell of my own is a man’s silence I have done nothing in six years to earn.
But that’s not why I lie. I want to be honest about that, even if it damns me. I don’t lie to protect my secret. I lie because behind that door is the only person who ever stayed, and I have spent six years learning what it does to me to be the one who hands him to the dark.
“No one’s in my house,” I say, and I smile, and I am so good at this, God forgive me, I am the best liar in three counties.
“I couldn’t sleep. I made tea, I turned on every light like an idiot, I’m a mess, that’s all.
You drove out in a storm because I’m a mess.
” I make myself laugh. “Go home, Eli. Please. Coach your kids tomorrow.”
Something in him deflates, not because he believes me, I can see that he doesn’t, not all the way, but because there’s nothing a good man can do with a woman who keeps choosing the locked door over his open hand.
He nods, slow. He looks at the second set of bootprints in the snow by my truck, the big ones, half-filled now, and I watch him decide not to ask, because asking would force a thing neither of us is ready for.
“Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay. But here.” He climbs the steps anyway, close enough that I tense, and he just, sets the unlit flashlight in my hands, folds my freezing fingers around it.
“It’s the heavy kind. Aluminum. You hold it by the lens end and it’s not a flashlight anymore, you understand me?
Anybody’s in your house you don’t want there, you don’t think, you just swing.
” His eyes hold mine, and they’re so kind it’s unbearable.
“I’m two minutes out on Bell Street. Green Bronco.
You call, I come. No paperwork, no questions, no order, no town. Just me. Okay?”
Green Bronco. Bell Street. Two minutes. Lazarus already gave me every word of it as a threat.
Eli’s just handed me the same map as a promise.
The exact same facts. That’s the whole difference between the two of them, I think, the same knowledge, one of them weaponized it and one of them gave it away, and I stand on my porch holding a stranger’s flashlight like it’s the last warm thing in the world and I want to weep, because I already know which man I’m going to keep, and it isn’t the one who’d save me.
“Okay,” I lie. “Thank you.”
He goes. The Bronco’s lights swing away down Cradle Hill, red taillights smearing in the snow, the ordinary world driving itself home, and I stand there until they’re gone and then I go back inside to the wolf.