10. Running Towards Five O’Clock
RUNNING TOWARDS FIVE O’CLOCK
SLOANE
Ispent my whole adult life learning not to watch clocks, because a clock is just a fence post you can't run to, and Ruiz drove one into the middle of my week and I've been running at it for two days.
Four fifty-one.
I'm in the office with the oak door shut and the phone face-up on the desk and a glass of whiskey poured that I have no intention of drinking.
My father taught me the trick at twenty-two — if you're about to do a hard thing with your hands, pour the glass first; gives your hands a place to stand.
My hands are flat on the desk on either side of it.
They aren't shaking. They haven't shaken since last night, since my own hand came down on a square of white cotton in the dark.
That's the part I keep coming back to. The fear used to live in my hands.
Now it's gone somewhere lower and quieter and I can't get at it to talk it down.
Cole is on the other side of the door. I can't hear him. That's how I know — a man that size and you hear nothing, which means he's standing the way he stands when he's working, weight even, quiet on purpose. He's been like that all day. A wall I didn't ask for and can't seem to mind.
Something changed in him this morning, after my father pulled him into the back of the store and the two of them talked the talk I wasn't invited to.
He's careful now in a way he wasn't at the bar.
He doesn't look at me the way he looked at me Tuesday.
He looks just past me, or at the room, or at the door — everywhere a man looks when he's decided not to look at the one thing he wants to.
I know that decision. I've made it about him forty times since Tuesday.
So we're both doing it. Both being walls. And the wall is the most romantic thing anybody's done for me in ten years, which tells you everything you'd ever need to know about my ten years.
Four fifty-eight.
The phone goes off at five exactly. Ruiz doesn't run late. I press the green circle and set the phone back down between my two flat hands.
"Sloane Mercer."
"Ms. Mercer. You're on the line at five. That tells me something."
"It tells you I pour a glass when I'm waiting. Don't read it as a yes."
"I won't read anything. I'll tell you what I said I'd tell you Friday, and then I'll listen." A pause, the kind she takes before the hard part, twenty-five years of taking it. "You asked what happened Tuesday in Billings."
"I did."
"We had a witness there. A protective arrangement — not custody.
She wouldn't take custody. She had a life she wouldn't leave.
" Ruiz lets that sit a half second, because she knows she's describing a woman who wouldn't take custody, who has a life she won't leave, and she is not above letting me hear the rhyme.
"Tuesday morning her car left the road. Dry day.
Straight stretch. No other vehicle within a mile of her. The county is calling it an accident."
"And you're not."
"I've buried enough accidents to know one when it's handed to me. She was the second-strongest thing I had. She could put Crane's Elders in a room where the money moved." A breath. "She can't anymore."
She gives me the rest flat. Two women in custody who can speak to the work and the money but never once saw the inside of the chapel.
One who went quiet six days ago and hasn't surfaced.
And the one in Billings, on a straight dry road.
Her case is coming apart in her hands, a woman at a time, and the only piece nobody can replace is the piece I've been carrying under my sleeve for ten years.
"You're the only person alive outside that fence," Ruiz says, "who was a Blessed One and got out before the ceremony.
You're the only one who can stand in front of twelve people and tell them what the white dress is for.
What's in the tea. What happens on that table, and what the girl is told is going to happen, in the days they spend making her ready.
Without you, Crane is a man who ran an odd church and moved some money around. With you, he's what he actually is."
I don't say anything. My hand has gone to my wrist. I make it stop.
"I won't pretend to you, Ms. Mercer. Saying yes does not make you safer.
You saw what came to your counter, and you just heard what came for a woman in Billings.
Saying yes makes you the single most important person alive to a man who's already shown he can reach the ones who matter.
" Her voice doesn't soften, and I'm grateful, because soft would break me and flat I can hold.
"That's the honest sentence. I owed you the honest sentence before you decided. "
Here's what she doesn't know, because I've never said it to anything but the dark.
The honest sentence doesn't frighten me the way it's built to.
Yes makes me a target — but they folded a square of cotton and laid it where my hand sleeps while I cut limes four blocks away, and they ran a woman off a dry road a whole state from here and called it weather, and they did every bit of it before I'd said one word to anyone.
I'm already the target. I've been the target since a voice in Boise gave my name six weeks ago.
The fortress failed last night. Quiet was never going to save me.
Quiet was just the price I paid for ten years, and the thing I bought with it is already gone.
So if I'm a target either way, the only question left on the table is whether I'm a target who did something, or a target who hid.
And then there's the part that settles it, and it has nothing to do with me at all.
One hundred miles south there is a girl in the second row of chapel.
She is fourteen, or she's fifteen, and somebody set her there in August where the new ones go, and she does not know yet what the white dress is.
She thinks she's been chosen. She thinks ‘holy one’ is a kind thing to be called.
Sister Agnes has a hand on the back of that girl's neck right now, this minute, while I sit in a warm office with a whiskey I'm not drinking.
I went over a fence for a girl like that once. I couldn't carry her out with me. All I could do was run, and pray that what I ran toward would one day be strong enough to come back for her.
This is the coming back.
It's the only fence I've got left to go over, and it runs straight through a courtroom in August, and on the far side of it is every girl they haven't put in the dress yet.
I will not be the reason Pastor Eli keeps his church.
"Put me on the list," I say.
Ruiz is quiet a beat. Not surprise — she doesn't do surprise. Something more like a thing set down carefully where I can't see it. "You understand what you're agreeing to."
"I understand it better than you do. I lived it.
You prosecute it." It comes out harder than I meant and exactly as true as I meant it.
"I'm not leaving Coldwater. I'm not leaving my father.
You protect me here or you don't protect me at all, but I am done running.
I did my running ten years ago and it cost me every single thing I had, and I built all of it back with my own two hands in this town, and I'm not handing them the second life on top of the first."
"Then we do it here. We've done it before.
" A pause, and then, for the only time across two phone calls, something in her gives a quarter inch.
"The dress, Ms. Mercer. The day you say it out loud in that room, you'll be the first woman in the history of that place who got to say it to people whose job is to write it down.
Hold onto that on the bad days. You're not telling a secret. You're laying a charge."
She hangs up.
I sit with the dead phone a minute. I've just told a federal prosecutor I'll stand in front of strangers and say the thing I've never once said out loud to my own father — and under the fear there's something I haven't felt in ten years and don't have a clean word for.
Not safe. The opposite of safe. But mine.
A thing I picked up with my own mouth instead of a thing that was done to me on a table.
I drink the whiskey then. One swallow. Earned.
I open the oak door.
He's right there, exactly where I knew he'd be, close enough that the door coming open brings me nearly into him.
He heard it — not the words, the shape of it through two inches of oak, the rise and the fall and the long quiet at the end.
He's looking at my face the way he looked at it Tuesday, before he taught himself to quit.
The wall's still up. I can see him holding it — my father's wall, whatever the two of them swore to each other in my father’s store, I'd bet the bar on it — making himself look just past me even now, even here, even with me close enough to feel the heat come off him.
He won't reach. Of course he won't. He didn't reach across a foot of bar Tuesday and he won't reach across two inches of air now.
He's a man who waits to be handed the thing.
He saw what I was the first night and didn't take it, and he's been not-taking it every hour since — and somewhere in this armed, sleepless week I've understood that the not-taking is the only thing that was ever going to get him through my door.
So I hand it to him.
I get a fist in the front of his shirt. I have to come up onto my toes, five foot two against six feet and change of a man gone suddenly, completely still, and I pull him down and I kiss him.
For one second the wall holds. One second where he doesn't move, doesn't take, holds himself off me on the last thread of an order I can feel even though I never heard it given.
Then the thread lets go.
One hand comes up into my hair like it's spent the whole week waiting to learn the shape of my head, and the other finds the small of my back and brings me in, and the wall isn't a wall, it's a man, and he kisses me back like something he's held so long it's gone past wanting and out the far side into an ache.
The office, the bar beyond the door, the whole armed week of it — gone.
There's his mouth and his hands and a low sound he makes against me that I feel land in my own chest, and there's ten years of every door bolted, and there's the one I threw open on purpose tonight.
I could let this take the floor out from under us both. I can feel exactly how it would go — he could lift me onto that desk and I would let him and I'd stop being careful for the first time since I was twenty.
Which is precisely why I pull back.
I put my hand flat on his chest — the same hand that's been steady through all of it — and I press, just enough, and he stops on a dime, gives me the half step back like he's been braced the whole time to give it the instant I asked.
We stand there breathing at each other in the doorway of the room where I just promised to testify, foreheads almost touching, his heart going under my palm every bit as hard as mine.
"That wasn't nothing," he says. Rough. Like the words cost him to lift. "I'm supposed to bring you nothing. I gave your father my word."
So I was right about the wall. "I know," I tell him. "You didn't bring it. I came and took it."
Something moves through him — relief, or its opposite, or the two at once. "Sloane. There are men in this town who'd use anything I feel for you to get a hand on you. That's the real reason I'm holding the line."
"I know that too." And I do. And it doesn't touch the other thing, which is that I spent ten years making myself a fortress nobody could want their way into, and tonight I went and wanted my own way out, and there's no unbuilding that now.
"So we hold the line. Both of us. We're good at it, you and me — it's about the only thing we've each got down to the bone.
" The corner of my mouth does the thing.
"We just both know now what we're holding it against."
He huffs something that's nearly a laugh, his forehead still on mine, and for one breath the armed week and the August courtroom and the dry road in Billings all go quiet, and it's two people who finally quit pretending in the doorway of a back office.
I told a prosecutor yes today. I told this man yes too, in a language that doesn't have a word in it.
Two fences. Both gone over. Inside the same hour.
I don't get to run from either one now. The girl who planned every escape down to the scrap of nightgown she left on the barb just walked herself, eyes wide open, into the two things she can't get back out of — and God help me, standing here with his heart slamming against my hand, I have not in ten years been one tenth this unafraid of being caught.