6. CHAPTER SIX #3
I took in the information. Turned it over the way I turned over everything she told me—cataloguing, filing, building the picture of a woman who visited children and baked bread and showed up at five in the morning because someone had to.
The pieces didn’t fit the profile of a witness to a crime worth fifty thousand dollars. They never had.
“How long have you been doing that?” I asked. The question was shorter than I’d meant it to be. Came out clipped, direct, the way most of my questions did when they weren’t about threats or logistics or the hundred practical details that kept us alive in this cabin.
“Three years.” She pushed off the counter, crossed to the table, and sat down across from me.
Not in the woven-seat chair—in mine, the one I’d been straddling backward all afternoon.
She turned it around, settled into it properly, and propped her elbows on the scarred wood with her chin in one hand.
Her red hair fell loose around her shoulders, catching the lantern light in strands that turned copper where the flame hit them.
“Your turn. Who taught you to fix things so quietly? The chair, the window, the skillet handle. You do it like you’re trying not to be noticed. ”
The question caught me off guard. Not because it was invasive,she’d earned the right to ask invasive questions roughly five days ago, when she’d stopped screaming and started cooking,but because the answer lived in a place I didn’t visit often and never with company.
“Nobody taught me.” I wrapped my hands around my coffee mug.
The tin was cold now, had been cold for an hour, but I held it anyway because my hands needed something to do.
The tattoos on my forearms caught the lantern light—tribal patterns, dark ink, the designs disappearing under my sleeves where they’d been rolled to the elbows.
“Grew up in a house where dinner was whatever didn’t require a trip to the store.
My mother worked nights. My father worked somewhere else, when he worked at all.
I learned early that if I wanted something hot, I’d better figure it out myself. ”
The words came out in pieces. Clipped. Reluctant.
Each sentence measured and placed like it cost me to say, which it did.
Hannah listened the way she did everything: wholly, without interruption, her green eyes steady on mine across the table and her chin still resting in her palm like she was settling in for a story she intended to hear all the way through.
“Did you ever burn anything?” she asked.
“Entire kitchen. I was eleven.”
She stared. Her eyebrows lifted. The corner of her mouth twitched—not toward a smile, toward a more complicated expression, the look of someone reassessing everything they thought they knew about the man across the table.
“The eggs were fine,” I added.
The laugh came out of her like a sound she’d been holding back since the onion incident and couldn’t contain any longer.
Harder this time. Fuller. Her shoulders shook, her head tipped back, and the sound filled the cabin from floor to ceiling, bright and warm and entirely at my expense in a way that should have irritated me and didn’t.
I watched her laugh. Watched the way it moved through her body—shoulders, chest, the line of her throat where the flannel collar had slipped to one side—and my own chest did the thing it had been doing all day whenever she made that sound.
A hitch. A catch. The strange sensation of a door opening that I’d spent twenty years keeping closed because doors that opened usually led to places I couldn’t afford to go.
My mouth pulled into a half-smile. Slow.
Crooked. The right side of my mouth lifting while the left stayed where it was, the scar along my jawline pulling tight in a way that should have hurt and didn’t.
I didn’t hide it. Didn’t turn away or clamp it down or do any of the things I usually did when my face threatened to show a feeling I hadn’t authorized.
Hannah was laughing, and the cabin was warm, and the stew was simmering, and for a few seconds none of the reasons we were here mattered as much as the fact that we were here, together, and she was laughing at a line I’d said, and I was letting her.
She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the idea of you at eleven, standing in a burned kitchen, holding a plate of perfect eggs like nothing had happened.”
“Nothing had happened to the eggs.”
This set her off again. The laugh came back, quieter this time but no less genuine, and she reached across the table without thinking and touched my forearm where the tattoos disappeared under my sleeve.
Her fingers were warm. The contact lasted two seconds, maybe three, and then she pulled back and reached for her coffee like the touch had been as accidental as the one in the kitchen and just as deliberate.
We ate the stew at the table. Tin bowls, wooden spoons, the fire crackling in the stove and throwing orange light across the scarred wood between us.
The stew was good. Thick, rich, the beans soft and the sausage holding its texture against hours of simmering.
Hannah tore pieces of the bread she’d made yesterday and used them to soak up the broth, and I did the same without thinking about why I was matching her movements, and neither of us spoke for the first few minutes because the food was too good to interrupt with conversation.
“It turned out well,” Hannah said, scraping the last of the broth from her bowl with a piece of bread.
“Better than the eggs,” I said.
She looked up at me. Held my gaze across the table for a beat longer than she needed to, and a current passed between us that had little to do with food. I’d just paid her a compliment in the only language I had, and she’d understood it perfectly.
Later, when the bowls were washed and the pot was soaking and the rain had settled into a soft, constant patter that sounded almost gentle against the roof, we found ourselves on the worn couch near the wood stove.
Not together—opposite ends, Hannah with her knees pulled up to her chest and her feet tucked under the blanket I’d given her that first night, me with my boots off for the first time since we’d arrived, my socks damp from the morning’s perimeter check and my bare feet pressed against the packed dirt floor where the cold seeped up through the wood and into the bones.
The lantern burned low on the table. Its flame guttered once when a draft found its way through the weatherstripping I’d missed, then steadied, casting the cabin in a light that made everything look softer than it was.
Hannah’s hair was loose around her shoulders, copper in the low light, and she had one arm draped over her knees with her chin resting on her forearm, watching the fire through the stove’s grated door.
I sat with my elbows on my knees, my forearms bare where I’d pushed the sleeves up, the tattoos catching what little light reached this end of the couch, and neither of us moved to go to bed even though the hour had pushed past whatever constituted a reasonable bedtime in a place without clocks.
The silence between us had changed. No longer the charged, watchful quiet of the first days, or even the careful, tentative silence of this morning.
This was different. It didn’t need to be filled with questions or answers or the ongoing negotiation that happened when two people were still figuring out what they were to each other.
This silence had weight, but the weight was comfortable.
Familiar, almost, in a way that should have alarmed me and didn’t.
The cabin felt less like a hiding place.
The logs held the day’s warmth—the stove’s heat, the stew’s steam, the shared quality of air that came from two people breathing the same space for long enough that the edges between them started to blur.
Outside, the mountain sat in darkness and rain.
The green sedan was forty miles south. The client had forty-eight hours and a lie about mountain terrain that wouldn’t hold, and somewhere beneath all of it was the thing I’d known since the first night in her kitchen: fifty thousand dollars bought a lot of things, but it didn’t buy the certainty that came from sitting on a worn couch at the end of a rainy day with a woman who laughed at your jokes and made stew that tasted like history.
I didn’t examine that thought. Didn’t turn it over or catalogue it or file it with the rest of the information I’d been gathering since I walked through her back door. Some thoughts were better left where they landed, and this one had landed in a place too warm to disturb with analysis.
The fire popped. A log settled, sending a shower of orange sparks against the cast-iron door.
Hannah’s eyes followed them, tracking the brief flare of light before it died, and she didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at her, and the rain kept falling on the roof above us, and the cabin held us both in its rough-hewn walls like it had been built for exactly this: not for hiding, not for waiting, but for the kind of stillness that happened when two people who had nowhere else to be decided, without saying it, that they weren’t in any hurry to leave.