CHAPTER FOUR #3
I worked with what we had. The chicken thighs,skin-on, bone-in, the way they’re supposed to be,seared in the cast iron until the fat rendered and the skin crisped.
Garlic from the supply run, sliced thin, sizzling in the rendered fat until the cabin smelled like a named kitchen, not a safehouse with a loaded gun on the table.
Canned tomatoes went in next, the good kind, whole peeled, crushing under my wooden spoon into a sauce that turned the color of sunset.
Herbs from the bunch I’d hung on the windowsill: rosemary, thyme, the purple thing that turned out to be oregano—chopped rough and stirred in at the last minute so they wouldn’t burn.
The bread dough had been rising since noon, wrapped in a dish towel near the stove where the residual heat kept the yeast happy.
I shaped it into a rough oval, slashed the top with Mustang’s pocketknife, and slid it into the hot skillet to bake while the chicken finished in the sauce.
The whole cabin filled with the smell of bread. Not the survival-food smell of canned stew and jerky. Real food. A meal made by hand. A smell that gets into wood and stays there, the way bread smell had already worked its way into the log walls and wasn’t planning to leave.
Mustang sat at the repaired table with the lantern beside him, cleaning a handgun.
He’d disassembled it completely. The parts lay on a cloth in front of him, arranged in the order they’d come apart—barrel, slide, recoil spring, guide rod, the magazine empty beside them.
His hands moved through the process with the same quiet efficiency they brought to everything: cotton patch through the barrel, bore brush twisting, solvent applied with a eyedropper to the slide rails, each component inspected, cleaned, laid back on the cloth in its place.
He didn’t look up when I pulled the bread from the skillet.
Didn’t comment on the smell. Just kept working, his focus absolute, the gun parts catching the lantern light in dull gleams of oiled metal.
The juxtaposition should have been jarring.
Woman at the stove, man at the table with a disassembled firearm, domesticity and violence sharing the same five hundred square feet of log cabin like they belonged together.
It was jarring. I felt it every time I turned from the stove and saw the gun parts spread across the cloth, the magazine, the box of ammunition sitting unopened beside his elbow.
This was the world I’d been dropped into.
A world where meals got made and weapons got cleaned in the same breath, where the man who’d bought me boots without asking was the same man who could field-strip a handgun blindfolded and probably had, many times, in places darker than this cabin.
I didn’t say anything about it. What would I say?
This is wrong felt hollow when the wrongness had started the moment he walked through my back door, and I was still here, and the bread was rising in the skillet, and the chicken was falling off the bone, and none of those things canceled out the gun on the table but they existed alongside it now, in the same room, under the same roof, and I was cooking for him anyway.
I plated his first. Set the tin down in front of him,chicken thigh, skin crisp, sauce pooling around it, a torn piece of bread on the side,and stepped back.
He paused. Mid-reassembly, the recoil spring half-compressed between his thumb and forefinger, his hands gone still above the cloth.
Looked at the plate. Looked up at me. A flicker moved across his face—fast, brief, there and gone before I could name it.
Not surprise, exactly. Closer to recognition, the way you look at a thing you hadn’t expected to see and realize, with a jolt, that you’d been waiting for it without knowing.
His jaw worked once. The scar pulled tight.
Then whatever it was shut down, folded away behind the steel-gray eyes, and he set the spring down and reached for his fork.
“Thanks,” he said. The word came out rough, unpracticed, like he hadn’t used it in a while and wasn’t sure it still fit his mouth.
I took my seat across from him. The repaired chair held firm under my weight, no wobble, the bracket doing its job beneath the wood.
I tore into my bread. He cut into his chicken.
We ate without speaking for the first few minutes, the only sounds the scrape of forks against tin, the occasional tick of the empty skillet cooling on the burner she'd turned off, the soft click of gun parts being laid aside as he cleared space for his plate.
The silence was different. Not the hostile, charged quiet of the first days, when every unanswered question hung between us like a thing with teeth.
This was quieter. Careful. A silence two people fall into when they’re no longer strangers but not yet anything else, and the space between those states is full of words neither of them knows how to say.
I broke it because someone had to, and it wasn’t going to be him.
“How long had that been leaking?” I nodded toward the window frame where the weatherstripping sat, gray against the dark wood, seamless now.
Mustang didn’t look up from his plate. “A while.”
I waited. He took another bite of chicken. Chewed. Swallowed. Drank from his coffee mug—the sturdier one, not the cracked one I’d been using before he swapped them. Didn’t add anything.
“Do you always just fix things without telling anyone?”
He picked up his coffee cup, both scarred hands wrapped around the tin, silver rings catching the lantern light. He took a slow drink before he answered. “Easier than waiting for someone to ask.”
The answer stayed in the space between us.
Simple. Direct. An answer that contained more truth than any explanation could have, because it wasn’t really about the window or the chair or the boots.
It was about him. If a thing was broken, he fixed it.
If someone was cold, he kept them warm. If a threat existed, he neutralized it.
No discussion. No performance. Just action, taken with the same steady hands that could field-strip a gun, seal a window gap, or reinforce a chair leg before anyone noticed it needed reinforcing.
The lantern light moved across the back of his hand as he reached for his bread.
The tattoos there,tribal patterns, dark ink, the designs disappearing under his sleeve,caught the flame and kept it, the skin beneath mapped with scars older than the ink.
I watched his hands. The same hands that had bound my wrists with zip ties.
The same hands that had fixed my chair and sealed my window and bought me boots without being asked.
The same hands that could take apart a gun and put it back together in the dark and had probably done worse things than I wanted to imagine, all with the same quiet precision he brought to everything.
What sort of man learns to take care of everything quietly?
Who teaches you that? Who showed you how to fix what’s broken without waiting to be thanked, without needing to be seen, without the validation of someone noticing that the cold draft is gone or the chair doesn’t wobble or the boots fit perfectly, which they would, because of course he’d known my size without asking?
And the question beneath that one, the one that tightened my throat every time I looked at him: who, if anyone, has ever taken care of you the same way?
The lantern flickered. A draft from somewhere,not the window, he’d fixed that,moved the flame sideways, and light slid across his knuckles, rings, and tattoos.
He tore another piece of bread without looking up.
I watched him eat in the warm, gun-oil-scented dark of a cabin that wasn’t just a cabin anymore, and the fear I’d carried since that first night was gone, replaced by something heavy, warm, and complicated sitting in my chest where the empty space had been.