8. Following Shadows
FOLLOWING SHADOWS
SLOANE
Bo trails me the five blocks home and my father trails Bo, the way the two of them have for ten years. I pull into the driveway. Bo passes. I flicker the porch light twice and watch my father's taillights take the corner, and then it's just me and the house.
I let myself in. Deadbolt. Lock. I cross to the slider in the dark to set the dowel, and the whole time my head is four blocks back at the bar, on a man who walked across town to be asked if he was one of them and said no before I finished the question.
Who sat with his hand a foot from mine on the wood and didn't move it.
I felt that hand not move for three hours after he left.
So I'm not paying attention. That's the part I'll hate myself for later — that after ten years of paying attention to everything, the one night it counted, I was thinking about a man.
I set the dowel. I go to the sink for the glass of water I drink in the dark every night of my life, and I put my hand down on the counter where the glass goes.
My hand comes down on cloth.
I go still.
It isn't a dishtowel. I know every dishtowel in this kitchen by feel — I fold them myself, I count them when they come back from the wash. This is finer. Folded once. Sitting dead center on the spot where I set my glass. Where my hand goes. Every night.
I turn on the little light over the stove, the first time I've needed a light in this kitchen in eight years, and I unfold it.
White cotton, washed soft — the soft that only comes from a hundred washings. The cotton a dress is made of. And stitched into the corner in thread a half-shade off the white, so you'd only ever find it holding it in your hand under a light at midnight: a circle. Inside the circle, a cross.
My right hand is already at my left wrist. I don't remember sending it there. It's pressing the place under my sleeve the way you press a burn that healed wrong, and under my fingers, under the cuff, is the same shape. Raised. Pale. Mine since I was nineteen.
The mark they put on the women when they decide you belong to them.
I stand in my own kitchen holding a square of white cotton with their seal on it, and I do the arithmetic I spent ten years making certain I'd never have to do.
The deadbolt was thrown when I came home. I threw the lock and the dowel myself, just now. My father painted every window in this house shut three winters ago; nobody came through glass. Nobody came through the front — I'd see it on a deadbolt I oil twice a year.
Which leaves the slider. The slider that wears a dowel from the minute I'm home to the minute I leave — and a latch, just a latch, the twelve hours a day I'm down the street making other people's nights.
They didn't break my fortress. They waited until I walked out of it.
They let themselves into my locked house in the afternoon while I cut limes four blocks away, set this where my own hand would find it in the dark, and latched the door behind them.
Then I came home and bolted myself in for the night with their message already on the counter.
For ten years I told myself they didn't know my name. Then, that they didn't know my state. Then my town. I built every lock in this house for the version of them that comes at night, through a door, while I'm in it.
They came in the daylight. Through the one stretch of the day a woman can't lock, because she has to leave it to earn a living.
Don't you fall apart now.
But I already am. That's what frightens me more than the cloth.
There's no shake in my hands. My breath is even and I never counted it down.
Ten years of coming apart at three in the morning over a dream, and now the real thing is folded in my fist and I've gone somewhere cold and flat and useful — somewhere my father built into me on Tuesday nights, the two of us never once saying out loud what we were building it for.
Now I know.
I set the cloth down. I go to the bedroom and take the Glock from the drawer, finger along the frame, and I clear my own house the way Walt taught me. Corners. Closets. Behind the shower curtain. Down on the floor to check the dark under the bed. I count the rooms twice. Empty, and empty again.
They were never going to still be here. That was never the message. The message is that they can be, any afternoon they choose, and I won't know until my hand comes down on what they leave.
I put the Glock on the kitchen table where I can reach it, and I call my father, my thumb finding him before I've decided anything — ten years of muscle.
First ring.
"Kiddo."
"They were in the house, Dad." Level. That scares me too. "Today, while I was at the bar. They left it on the counter."
The line goes quiet, and in the quiet I hear him already moving — a chair, keys.
"Don't touch anything else."
"I already did. Picked it up before I knew what it was."
"Then it's done, kiddo. Two minutes. Don't open that door for anybody but me."
He hangs up.
And here is what I do next — the thing ten years of me wouldn't recognize.
I don't sit down with the Glock and the locks and my father two minutes out and call that enough, the way it has always, always been enough.
I scroll to a number I put in my phone three hours ago, behind my own bar, telling myself it was only so I could reach him if a watcher turned up.
I call Cole.
He answers on the second ring, and he doesn't sound like a man who was asleep, because he wasn't. "Sloane."
Just my name, and already moving under it — the floor, boots, a door.
"They were inside my house." I flatten my free hand on the table beside the Glock, needing to touch one thing in this kitchen that still makes sense. "I'm okay. My dad's coming. I just?—"
I don't have the end of the sentence. I've never had to build the end of that sentence, because for ten years there's been nobody on the other end of it but my father, and my father has never needed the words.
"You called me," he says. Low. Like he's setting it down somewhere he won't lose it.
"I called you."
"I'm already gone. Stay on the line."
So I stand in a house I locked against the wrong hours, holding proof that the worst thing I know has been close enough, this whole time, to fold a square of cotton and lay it where my hand sleeps — and I stay on the line with a man I've known four days, listening to him breathe his way across town toward me, getting closer, and feeling, God forgive me, less alone than I've felt since I was sixteen years old.
That's the thing they'd most want to know, if they're half as good as they seem.
Not that they got into my house.
That after ten years of locking every door I own, there's finally one I left open on purpose — and he's already coming through it.