16. Jett #3
The dark came down soft on the room. Her hand found mine under the duvet and her fingers laced into mine, and we lay there like that for I don't know how long.
The warm Saturday-night dark of the desert all around us.
The city below us. The man at the motel four hours into Hollis Briar's surveillance.
The woman in my bed with her scars finally washed and her hand finally in mine.
And somewhere behind the doors I'd welded shut for nine years, a piece of me cracked open that I hadn't known how to crack open before.
I did not name it.
She did not ask.
I felt her breathing slow as she went under.
I held her hand until she was gone.
Then I lay in the dark a long time without sleeping, looking at the ceiling, doing the math on a man in a motel and a woman in my bed and the eleven-year-old girl with a belt-shaped scar on the back of her left thigh.
The math came out clean.
It had been clean since the kitchen on Friday night, if I was being honest with myself.
Maybe since that first afternoon three weeks ago, when I watched her hand shake on a pen and decided not to burn her down because the burning wasn't worth the cost. Clean for longer than I'd been letting myself admit.
The woman in my bed was a problem I was going to spend the rest of my life solving, and the problem wasn't a problem.
The problem was the answer to a question I'd been refusing to ask for nine years.
I closed my eyes.
I fell asleep with her hand in mine.
In the morning I woke up at six.
She was still asleep. Her hair a mess across my pillow. Her face relaxed in a way I hadn't seen it relax in any room I'd ever been in with her. The duvet up to her chin. Her hand still in mine, though it had loosened in sleep the way hands do.
I did not move. I watched her sleep a long minute.
Then I carefully extracted my hand and got up.
Pulled on sweats. Went down the stairs in bare feet.
Made coffee. Sat at the island with the coffee in front of me and the morning sun spilling over the ridge into the valley through the wall of glass, and checked my phone for the Hollis Briar update I'd scheduled for six.
It was there.
Subject left motel at 5:47 a.m. Driving west. Tracking. Will update at 7.
I sat with that.
I sent a one-word reply. Eyes.
I put the phone face-down on the counter.
I sat with my coffee and waited for her to wake up, and I did the small clean math on the rest of the day that was coming, and I did not panic, because panic belongs to a man who hasn't yet decided what he's going to do, and I had decided.
I'd decided in the kitchen at one in the morning, holding a woman's hand under a duvet in a house I hadn't let anyone see, exactly what I was going to do.
I was going to keep my word.
I was going to be the wall.
The rest, I'd figure out as I went.
She came down at seven forty-three in one of my old practice shirts she'd found in the bathroom and a pair of leggings she'd brought in her bag the day before.
Hair up. Face washed. She looked, in the early morning light at my kitchen island, like a woman who'd slept the deepest sleep she'd slept in a long time, and I tried not to take credit for that, and I failed, and I let myself take a small quiet amount of credit for it anyway.
"Morning," she said, voice still thick with sleep.
"There's coffee."
"God, yes."
I poured her a cup. Slid it across. She picked it up.
"Hartley."
"Yes."
"He left the motel at five forty-seven this morning."
She stilled.
I let her go still.
I didn't say anything else until she nodded.
"Hollis is on him. I'll know where he is by seven thirty. We have time to figure out the day. I'm telling you now because I'm not going to keep things from you that I know, and I want you to have your coffee while we think about it, not after. Drink your coffee."
She drank her coffee.
She thought about it.
She set the cup down.
"Okay," she said. "Let's figure out the day."
The sun came up. The phone, face down on the counter, didn't buzz yet.
The valley was alight. The woman across from me had slept in my bed, the first time in eight years any woman had slept in my bed at all, and she had her hands wrapped around a coffee cup and her hair up and the faint mark of a finger-shaped bruise on the soft skin where her shoulder met her neck, which she hadn't noticed yet and which I had no intention of pointing out.
We figured out the day.
We had a lot of day to figure out.
There was a game in it. Phoenix, at home, the back half of a split we hadn't played well in either half of.
I'd known that schedule cold since training camp, every back-to-back and every flight and every gap I could use to sleep, and I'd never once in eight years woken up on a game day and had to remember there was a game.
I remembered late. I remembered with her foot hooked over my shin and the valley coming up gray, and the plain truth was we'd been finding ways to lose games we were built to win, and I lay there in the gray not thinking about a single one of them.
I had a feeling we were going to be figuring out days together for a long time after this one.
I did not, in that moment, mind.
I did not, in that moment, mind one bit.