Chapter One #3
I looked at Caleb. He was studying the inside of his mug with intense focus, the tips of his ears turning pink.
“Eastern Europe,” I said. “Then South America. Then back.”
“Specific?”
“No.”
“Fair.” Mitch nodded, like I’d given him exactly what he’d expected, which was nothing, and somehow that was enough. “You get shot?”
“No.”
“Stabbed?”
“No.”
“Fall down some stairs?”
I drank my coffee. The silence stretched.
Mitch’s grin widened. “You fell down some stairs.”
“It was a very unfriendly set of stairs.”
He laughed. The real laugh again, the one that came from somewhere behind his sternum and filled the room without trying, and I felt it land in my chest the same way I’d felt it the first time—like a round I hadn’t heard coming.
“That’s the most Sterling Callahan thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “I’m putting it on a t-shirt. ‘It was a very unfriendly set of stairs.’ People will buy it. I’ll be rich.”
“You’ll be disappointed.”
“I’m used to it. Comes with the territory of knowing you.”
The conversation moved. Or rather, Mitch moved it, steering it through the shallow waters of ranch business and weather and the new foal in the north pasture that had been born while I was gone, and I let him.
I offered single-word responses when required and silence when it wasn’t, and Caleb filled the gaps with quiet observations about the garden he’d started behind the bunkhouse and the bread he’d been baking in the cast-iron range, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I was listening.
Actually listening, not just waiting for my turn to stop talking.
The ranch went dark outside. The wind picked up off the pasture, pushing at the east door until the hinges creaked. The stove settled into its night rhythm, ticking as the metal cooled, and the bunkhouse filled with the silence of a building that had decided, for the moment, to be still.
I was on my bed, staring at the ceiling, when the full weight of it hit me.
I could hear them breathing.
Not loud. Not obtrusive. Just the soft, regular sound of two people asleep in a room twenty feet from mine, and the fact that I could hear it at all meant my hearing was better than I’d given it credit for, or I was paying more attention than was strictly necessary.
Probably both.
Mitch and Caleb Pruitt had been living in the back of my head for four months.
Behind a door I’d labeled “irrelevant” and kept shut through two continents and one very bad set of stairs.
I had carried them through Tbilisi and Caracas and a series of hotel rooms that all smelled the same, and I had not opened the door.
I had not examined the contents. I had treated the whole thing the way I treated every variable I couldn’t control—I had acknowledged its existence, assigned it a category, and moved on.
The door was open now.
I could hear Mitch’s breathing, deeper and slower than his brother’s.
I could hear the soft shift of blankets, the creak of a bed frame taking weight.
I could picture them in there—Mitch on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes, probably snoring at a volume that would wake the dead; Caleb curled on his side, one hand tucked under the pillow, his face relaxed in a way it never quite was when he was awake.
I looked at the ceiling. The exposed beams, the knots in the pine, and the pattern of shadows the single bulb threw across the wood.
I did not have the energy to close the door. My leg hurt. My body was running on reserves that had been depleted somewhere over the Atlantic, and the coffee had worn off, and the simple fact of being horizontal after fourteen hours of travel had hit me like a tranquilizer dart.
But if I was honest with myself—and I was always honest with myself, it was one of my least convenient qualities—it wasn’t just the energy.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
The admission sat in my chest like something with weight. Not a wound. Not a threat. Something quieter and more persistent, the kind of thing that didn’t announce itself with pain or urgency but simply existed, taking up space, refusing to be filed under “irrelevant” or “later” or “never.”
I closed my eyes. The bunkhouse creaked. The wind pushed at the east door. Through the wall, someone—Caleb, probably—sighed in his sleep, a soft, unconscious sound that carried no meaning and somehow meant everything.
I left the door open. Just for tonight. Just because I was tired, and the leg hurt, and closing it would require more effort than I had in reserve.
Tomorrow, I told myself. Tomorrow I would close it. I would reassess. I would remember who I was and what I did and why two men with hazel eyes and a flannel shirt had no business taking up residence in a part of my head that was supposed to be empty.
Tomorrow.
The ceiling didn’t answer. The bunkhouse didn’t care.
Somewhere, Mitch Pruitt snored, and the sound of it was familiar in a way that made no sense at all, and I lay there in the dark and listened to the silence of a door staying open because the man on the other side of it had decided, for once, not to fight.