Chapter Eight #3
Rawley paused at the door. Held Sterling’s gaze for a moment.
Something passed between them—unspoken, weighty, the communication of two men who had done this long enough to have a shorthand that didn’t require words.
Then he was gone, his boots heavy on the porch steps, fading toward the main house.
Jackson lingered a half-second too long at the coffeepot, refilling his mug with the focused attention of a man who was using the task as cover for something else.
Caleb touched his arm on the way past. Brief. Just contact—fingers against flannel, no words, just the particular warmth Caleb brought to everything, and Jackson’s shoulders dropped about half an inch. Not much. Enough.
Cruz waited at the door. Patient. Certain.
The bunkhouse settled. The kind of quiet that happened after something had been said and everyone had heard it, and now the work was waiting, and the waiting had its own particular weight.
Caleb started clearing plates. Sterling picked up his phone and pulled the photos back up. He’d been looking at them for ages. He was going to keep looking until he saw something new, or until the something new found us, whichever came first, and I knew this about him now.
Knew a lot of things about him now. The list kept getting longer, and I kept adding to it, and the adding had stopped feeling like reconnaissance and started feeling like something else entirely.
I leaned over Sterling’s shoulder. Close. Close enough that the warmth of him radiated through his shirt, close enough that I could smell pine soap and coffee and something that was just Sterling, the scent that lived in the bunkhouse now whether he meant for it to or not.
Sterling went very still. Not discomfort.
We both knew what discomfort looked like on Sterling Callahan—the particular set of his jaw, the way his eyes went flat—and this wasn’t that.
This was the other thing. The thing Sterling hadn’t fully named out loud yet, the thing that lived in the space between his shoulder blades when I got inside his perimeter, and the fact that he let me stay there was its own kind of confession.
I looked at the boot print photo. The diamond tread, sharp in the morning light.
“You’re going to figure out who it is,” I said.
Sterling said nothing.
“And then you’re going to handle it.”
Sterling said, still looking at the phone, “That’s the plan.”
“Good.”
Then, because I couldn’t entirely help myself: “For what it’s worth, I thought the bait idea was smart.”
Sterling said, “It’s not your idea.”
“I know. I’m complimenting your idea.”
“That’s not what it sounded like.”
“Sterling.”
“What.”
“Take the compliment.”
A pause. The kind that contained a recalibration, a reassessment, and the particular struggle of a man who had spent years rationing praise the way he rationed everything else.
“It’s a solid play,” Sterling said, flat.
I grinned. “There you go.”
I straightened up and went to help Caleb with the dishes.
Didn’t turn around to confirm it. Didn’t need to.
I could feel the weight of Sterling Callahan’s attention settling between my shoulder blades like something deliberate, something chosen, and the feeling of it was warm and specific and entirely its own thing.
Caleb handed me a dish towel. Under his breath, voice low enough that only I could hear it: “He watched you the whole way across the room.”
“I know,” I said, also under my breath.
“He’s not even pretending.”
“I know.”
“This is very exciting.”
My lips lifted in a smirk. “I know.”
“Are you going to say anything other than I know?”
I thought about it. Dried a plate. Thought about it some more.
“Probably not right now,” I said.
Caleb nodded, satisfied, and handed me another plate.
From the table, Sterling said, without looking up, “The cinnamon rolls were good.”
Caleb said, “Thank you.”
Sterling said, “Mitch should have left the last one.”
I said, “Burke got the last one.”
Sterling said, “That’s what I said.”
I laughed. Caleb laughed. The sound of it bounced off the ceiling beams and the cast-iron pans and the open shelving where the mismatched mugs lived, and Sterling went back to his phone, but the corner of his mouth was doing the thing—the small, stubborn warmth that lived in the crease beside his left eye and never quite made it to full deployment.
I turned back to the dishes. Dried a plate. Got on with the morning.
There was a threat on the perimeter. There was a traitor somewhere in the network. There were boot prints in the mud and a cut fence and a dark truck idling on a county road with windows too tinted to see through.
And Sterling Callahan was sitting ten feet away with that small stubborn warmth at the corner of his mouth, his eyes on his phone, his bad leg stretched out under the table where the stiffness didn’t show, and somehow all of those things were true at the same time, existing in the same kitchen, under the same roof, in the same Montana morning that smelled like cinnamon and warmth and something worth staying for.
I wouldn’t change a single one of them.