Chapter Eight #2
“There’s a kind of trust you only get from being scared next to someone at four in the morning,” Juno said, still not looking at me, working a kink out of the rope with two fingers the way you’d work a knot loose without thinking about it.
“Storm coming in, both of you knowing the other one’s the only reason you’re still on the wall.
I’d guess you know that too. Just over a radio instead of a rope. ”
Something in my chest went tight and cold, close enough to the tent recording still sitting unmentioned on my drives that my hands went still on the rail for a second before I answered.
“I know it,” I said, carefully, giving her the truth without the specific six minutes underneath it.
“I’ve talked people down from worse than a storm.
It doesn’t always look like fear from the other end of the line. Sometimes it just sounds like weather.”
She glanced at me then, something assessing in it, and I understood she’d heard the door I’d left open a crack and chosen, for now, not to push it further.
“I don’t need you to feel guilty,” I said instead.
“I need you to be accurate about whose hands were on it, going forward. That’s a smaller ask than it sounds like. ”
“Is it,” she said, and there was an edge in it I recognized, not hostility exactly, something closer to the wariness of a person being asked to spend capital she wasn’t sure she had.
“I’m not the one who cut your interviews down to a caption, Hollis.
I edit to a brief. I’ve never once been handed a brief that said give the wife more room and ignored it.
I’ve been handed briefs that said the opposite, and I did my job inside them, the same way you built a medevac budget inside whatever the insurers would actually pay out.
You don’t get to be angry at the rope for the fall factor somebody else calculated. ”
I didn’t answer right away. That one was precise enough to earn a moment of quiet before I gave it back to her.
“That’s fair,” I said. “I’m not angry at you for doing your job inside somebody else’s brief.
I’ve done the same thing myself, more than once, in more rooms than I want to count.
I’d just ask you to notice, the way I’m noticing, whose name is on the brief when it comes time to actually change it. ”
She held my eyes a beat longer than the exchange required, something moving behind her expression that I couldn’t fully read yet — not agreement, not quite, but the stillness of a person filing a fact away rather than arguing with it.
“Noted,” she said, and it was the driest word she’d used all afternoon, and also, I thought, the most honest.
? ? ?
She left a little before three, paperwork signed, the SUV pulling carefully back down the gravel spur at a speed that told me she trusted her own driving on loose surface more than the rental company’s tires, and I stood on the porch afterward doing the inventory I’d started doing at the end of every hard conversation lately.
Juno Reyes-Park was not, whatever the shape of my marriage had led me to half-expect walking into that visit, a woman auditioning to replace me, and I understood, standing there, how easy it would have been to build her into that shape anyway — a woman who’d shared a rope with my husband through storms I’d only ever managed from four thousand miles away by satellite phone, who knew a register of his fear I’d only ever heard secondhand on a recording he hadn’t known was running.
That closeness was real. It had never once, as far as I could tell, been anything I had a right to call betrayal, and it still sat in my chest like a smaller, colder cousin of the thing that had happened to me, and I made myself hold both facts at once rather than collapsing them into the easier, uglier story.
I thought about the two women I’d watched Juno be that afternoon — the one who’d crouched to Birdie’s height and refused to lie to a seven-year-old, and the one who’d priced a title dispute the way I’d price a medevac contingency, unblinking, exact — and understood that neither version canceled the other out, the same way she holds the fort hadn’t canceled out twelve years of a real marriage.
A person could be genuinely kind to my daughter and still be, professionally, someone I had every reason to hold at arm’s length until the facts told me otherwise.
I didn’t think Wade would have found that complicated.
He’d have called it exactly what it was: two separate readings off two separate instruments, both true, neither one canceling the other.
I thought about my problem too the rest of the afternoon, the weight she’d put on it, and understood I had just met someone doing her own version of the math I’d been doing since Day One — a woman whose competence was real, whose credit told a story about who’d made something, and who had not, yet, decided how much that story was worth fighting for out loud.
I didn’t know what sat on her own chain of title, whose name had been trimmed off whose brief.
I only knew, watching her taillights disappear down the gravel spur the same way Loralei’s had four days earlier, in the opposite emotional direction entirely, that I’d just spent an afternoon with a woman who might turn out to be an ally, and that I had no intention of assuming so before she’d earned it, any more than she’d assumed it of me.
Day Twelve. Nine hundred hours, still mine. One more person now who knew the real number, and hadn’t flinched at it, and one small, unguarded exchange on my own porch, between my daughter and a woman I’d half-built into a rival, that I was going to need longer than an afternoon to fully understand.