Chapter Five #2
"Then I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that.
" I zip the deposit bag, set it by the door for the morning run to the bank, and finally let myself glance out the window at him, still sitting there, patient, not looking back at the shop even though he must know I'm watching.
"It was easier when I could point at him and say, there, that's the man who lied to me.
I don't know how to be angry at a man who's currently doing everything right. "
Deb doesn't answer right away, which is unusual enough for her that I actually turn to look at her, and I catch something on her face I don't often see there, something careful and a little sad underneath the usual sharp edges.
"You don't have to be angry at him to still protect yourself, Ro," she says finally.
"Those aren't the same job. You can watch a man do everything right for three days, or three weeks, and still decide it's not enough, still decide the cost of finding out was too high the first time to risk finding out again.
Nobody gets to tell you which one's the right call.
Not even a man who's suddenly real good at checking hinges. "
I watch her say it, and something about the certainty in her voice makes me wonder, not for the first time, what exactly Deb's protecting herself from these days, since she's never once in nine years let a man close enough for it to matter this much to her.
She'd deny it if I asked. She always does.
"That's oddly wise for someone who once dated a man because his truck had good speakers."
"I contain multitudes." She grabs her jacket off the hook, pauses at the door, glances out at Wyatt's silhouette across the street one more time before she goes.
"For what it's worth, though, since you're clearly going to keep asking me for my read on this whether you admit it or not.
I don't think he's performing. I think he's terrified, and doing the work anyway, which is a different thing entirely from a man who's just trying to look good. "
She heads out into the evening, and I catch just enough of what she calls to Wyatt on her way past his bike, something about what happens to a man's kneecaps if anything happens to her best friend on his watch, to know she means every word of it even dressed up as a joke.
He lifts a hand in acknowledgment without getting off the bike, without crossing the street, without doing anything that would make this easier or harder than it already is.
I finish closing alone, the way I've closed alone for eight months, except tonight there's a man thirty feet away making sure nothing happens to me while I do it, and I don't know yet whether that fact makes me feel safer or just more exposed in a different, quieter way.
Before I head up, I run my hand along the edge of the plywood covering the window frame, testing it the way I've tested it every night since Monday, out of habit more than doubt that Wyatt secured it properly.
It holds solid. It always holds solid. I do it anyway, because eight months of learning to trust only what I can verify myself isn't a habit that breaks just because there's a man outside willing to stand guard over it.
I flip the sign, kill the lights except the one over my station, and head for the stairs up to the apartment.
At the door I stop, hand on the frame, and look back across the street one more time before I go in.
He's still there. Still not moving toward me, still just watching the building the way he's been assigned to watch it, patient in a way I don't remember him being before Amarillo, before any of this, a stillness that looks earned instead of performed even though I don't want it to.
"Goodnight, Wyatt," I call out, before I can talk myself out of it, my voice carrying easy across the empty street.
A beat of silence, long enough that I almost regret saying it at all.
"Goodnight, Rowan." His voice comes back quieter than mine, careful, like he's handling something breakable. "Lock the deadbolt. Both of them."
Not "sleep well" or "see you tomorrow," nothing that assumes more familiarity than either of us has earned back yet.
Just a practical instruction, the kind a man gives when he's decided the safest thing he can offer her tonight is competence instead of warmth.
I notice that I notice it, which tells me more about where my own guard actually stands than I'm ready to admit to Deb, or to him, or to myself in anything but the dark of my own stairwell.
I do. I stand just inside my own door a moment longer than necessary, listening to the quiet click of both locks settling into place, and I don't examine too closely why some small, treacherous part of my chest feels lighter tonight than it has in eight months, why the sound of his bike still idling across the street feels less like surveillance and more, God help me, like something closer to comfort.
I climb the stairs, and up in the apartment I sit on the edge of my bed a while before I change out of my work clothes, phone in my hand, Carol's words still turning over in my head alongside the memory of Wyatt's voice through the alley dark, I'm standing here, there's a difference .
Six years apart, she'd said, before her and her ex figured out how to be in the same room without fighting.
Didn't work out in the end, she'd said that too, and I hold onto that part deliberately, because I'm not interested in a fairy tale where showing up for three days erases five months of lies.
I'm interested in whether a man can keep choosing the harder, quieter thing long after anyone's watching closely enough to notice, and three days isn't nearly enough time to know that yet, no matter what my chest wants to believe on a Thursday night with a boarded-up window and his bike ticking cool in the dark across the street.
I set an alarm, plug in my phone, and lie there a long while in the dark listening for the particular sound of an engine finally shutting off across the street, some time well past midnight, followed by nothing at all, which I choose to take as evidence he's settled in for the rest of the night rather than gone somewhere I'd have to explain to myself why I noticed.
I don't let myself think about it any further than that. Not tonight.