CHAPTER 33
WREN
The day before the longest night, I do the cruelest kind thing I know how to do: I drive into town and I break Eli Marsh’s heart on purpose, so that whatever comes up that mountain can’t find him standing next to me.
He’s at the station, end of his shift, and he comes out to the lot when he sees my truck because of course he does, decent to the last, hopeful in that flannel-shirt way that’s going to be the death of him if I let it, and I have rehearsed this the whole drive and it still nearly kills me to start.
“I need you to stop,” I say. “All of it. The file. The sealed name. Driving out to my place. Looking at me like that. I need you to stop, Eli, and I need you to mean it.”
“Wren —”
“I’m seeing him.” It comes out flat, ugly, a lie wearing exactly enough truth to cut.
“Lazarus. I have been since he came back. The order’s a formality I haven’t bothered to lift.
You’ve been knocking on a door for a woman who’s already let the wolf in, and you look like a fool doing it, and the whole town’s starting to notice.
” I make myself hold his eyes while it lands.
“There’s nothing to investigate. There’s no case.
There’s just a sad story everybody already knows the ending of, and a deputy in a flannel shirt who can’t take a hint. ”
It works. I can make true things sound like spite and spiteful things sound like mercy, it’s the one craft the house ever taught me, and I watch it work on his decent open face, watch the hope go out of it in stages, and it’s exactly as terrible as I knew it would be, and I do it anyway, because terrible is survivable and a Frost’s attention is not.
But Eli Marsh is better than I gave him credit for, because the hurt finishes moving through him and what’s left underneath it isn’t wounded pride. It’s that same bone-deep worry, sharpened now.
“No,” he says slowly. “See, that’d land, except I’ve been doing this job long enough to know the difference between a woman telling me to get lost and a woman trying to get me out of the way of something.
” He steps closer, lowers his voice, and his eyes are so steady I have to work not to look away.
“You’re not pushing me off because you don’t want me, Wren.
You’re pushing me off because you’ve done the math and decided I’m safer at a distance.
I’ve watched you do it to the whole town for two weeks.
You quarantine people. You decide who’s allowed near the thing that’s hunting you, and you keep the good ones out, and you call it protecting them.
” He shakes his head. “What did you find out? What changed in the last two days? Because something did. You’ve got the look of someone who’s already decided to do something stupid and brave and alone. ”
And God, I want to tell him. That’s the trap of a genuinely good man, he makes you want to hand him the truth, because for one second it feels like he could carry it.
I look at Eli Marsh, with his green Bronco and his under-tens and his flannel and his maddening decency, and I think about a sealed name two counties over, and a patient family, and a music box that plays when someone’s decided, and I understand with total clarity that if I let this man one inch closer to Silas Frost, I will be planning his funeral inside a week.
So I give him the only true thing I can afford, because he’s earned that much.
“You’re right,” I say quietly. “I’m pushing you off to keep you alive.
And the reason I’m doing it instead of letting you help is that the last good man who got close to me is doing six years for it, no.
That’s not even true anymore. The last good man who got close to me is the reason I’m standing here at all, and I repaid him by burying him, and I will not — will not, do that to another one.
You don’t get to be brave about this, Eli.
You don’t get to be the second man I cost everything.
I won’t survive it, and neither will you.
” My voice cracks and I let it. “So please. For me. Be the man who walked away when a frightened woman told him to. Coach your kids. Drive your Bronco. Be alive in a week. That’s the only thing you can do for me that I can actually carry. ”
He’s quiet for a long moment in the cold lot, snow starting again, and I watch him understand that this is the one fight he can’t win, that there’s no version of staying that helps me, that the kindest thing left to him really is to go.
“Okay,” he says finally, and his voice is rough.
“Okay. I’ll back off.” Then he reaches into his pocket and presses something into my hand, the heavy aluminum flashlight, the one from the porch, the one I’ll carry up a mountain tomorrow night without knowing yet that I will.
“But this stays with you. Non-negotiable. And the offer under it stays too, green Bronco, Bell Street, two minutes, no order, no town, no questions. You call, I come, even after tonight, even if you spent the whole conversation telling me to get lost.” His jaw works.
“Some of us don’t need to be wanted to show up, Wren. We just need to know where you are.”
I take the flashlight. It’s so heavy and so solid and so kind that I almost break right there in the parking lot.
“Goodbye, Eli,” I say, and I mean it as a goodbye, because some part of me already knows how tomorrow night ends, with the truth loose in the world and me running down a mountain into a life that doesn’t have a green Bronco in it.
“Not goodbye,” he says, stubborn, decent, doomed to be the good man in a story that isn’t his. “See you around, Ms. Mercer.”
He goes inside. I sit in my truck in the snow with his flashlight in my lap and I let myself cry for exactly as long as it takes the windshield to fog, and then I wipe my face and I drive home to the wolf, to the last night before the longest one, with one more good thing successfully pushed out of the blast radius and the whole cold weight of what I’m about to do settling into me like snow over a lawn that nothing has walked across in years.
He came when the porch light came on. He’ll come up the mountain when the breathing stops. I’m counting on both of them now, my wolf and my good man, the two ends of the only safety I’ve got, one I’m running toward, and one I just made sure is far enough away to survive me.
Tomorrow is the longest night of the year.
I’ve decided how it ends. I just haven’t told anyone who loves me.