20. The Cost of Deception
THE COST OF DECEPTION
SLOANE
Three days I run the long con on the people who love me, and I'm good at it, which is the part that should frighten me and doesn't.
I do the deposition prep like a woman planning for August. I answer the federal woman's questions flatter every day.
I let Cole do the locks with me and I let Bo walk me out and I flicker the porch light twice for my father, and I keep my hands steady and my face shut, and the whole time I am cataloging the thing none of them can see me building.
The shift change on the detail, the twenty minutes at the seam Cole named out loud without knowing he was handing me a door.
The route south. The long dark hours of it.
The east fence, which I could find blind, because I found it blind once, going the other way.
I'm going back. That's the thing I decided in a church an hour north and have not said to one living soul.
I am going back over that fence, the wrong direction, for a girl I left at it ten years ago and a woman who spent her ceremony to buy me mine.
I know it's madness. Cole said so without knowing the shape of it — don't do the part where you decide you have to do it by yourself.
I'm doing the part. I'm doing every part of it by myself, because the only thing worse than going back into that place is taking somebody I love in there with me.
Already there, Mercer. That's the trouble.
I have never in my life been this together, and it's the cold flat useful kind my father built on Tuesday nights, the kind that came when my hand found white cotton in the dark — and I finally understand what he was building it for.
He was building it for the day I'd need to be a weapon and not a witness.
The day comes Thursday, at eleven in the morning, behind the oak door he hung himself.
Ruiz doesn't make me wait for the hard part. She never has. It's the thing I like best about her and the thing I'll hate her for, after.
"I'm going to say it plain," she says, "because you've never once thanked me for soft." A pause, the twenty-five-year pause, except this one's different, this one has something underneath it I haven't heard off her in four phone calls. "Hannah's gone, Sloane."
The office goes very far away.
"Gone how?"
"Gone the way the safe ones aren't supposed to be able to go.
We had her in a location only six people knew.
Sometime Tuesday night she went out a window that doesn't open from the inside without a key, and there's no sign she opened it, and there's every sign somebody opened it for her.
" Ruiz's voice doesn't crack, and I'm grateful, because if hers cracked mine would shatter.
"No body. No blood. A clean lift. Professional.
The kind of clean that tells you exactly who, because nobody else is that good and that quiet. "
"Back," I say. My own voice from a long way off. "They took her back."
"That's my read. I won't dress it as anything softer.
A woman who ran from them twice, who named you, who sat down with you in a church — they don't kill that one fast. They take her home and they make her an example, and they make sure the next woman thinking about a deposition hears every detail of it.
" A breath. "I'm sorry. I know what she was to you.
I knew it the day you sat in that booth and answered my questions about the dress without once mentioning her name, because you were protecting her even then. "
I don't say anything. I can't. There's a sound trying to come up out of me and I am not making it in this office with my father on the other side of the door.
"Sloane. There's no version where you blame yourself for this and you're right to. You hear me?"
But there is. There's exactly one version, and I'm standing in it.
Hannah surfaced once in ten years, for one hour, in a church she picked because she trusted nobody and trusted me, and she walked in carrying the bravest thing she ever did and walked out marked, because being near me is a thing that gets you taken now.
They read her off the meeting. Ruiz warned me they might.
I went anyway, because I wanted the reunion, because I wanted the one I left back, because for one minute in the colored light I got to have her — and the cost of that minute was the rest of her life.
She told me thirteen words at a potato table and it cost her a ceremony. She told a federal prosecutor my name and it cost her the dark. She sat down in a pew with me and it cost her everything that was left.
Everyone who loves me pays. That's the arithmetic.
It's been the arithmetic since I was sixteen and a woman put her hand on the back of my neck and called me holy, and I spent ten years building walls to make the math come out different, and then I tore them down for a man with a scar on his hand and called myself brave for it — and look what brave bought. Look what it cost Hannah.
"I have to go," I tell Ruiz.
"Sloane—"
I hang up on a federal prosecutor for the first time in four phone calls, and I sit at the desk in the office that used to be a storage closet, and I put both hands flat on the wood, and I do not cry.
I burn instead.
It comes up the way it came up in the sage ten years ago, the night I ran — the thing bigger than the fear, the only thing that ever was.
Anger. At Pastor Eli, south in a cell, still reaching, still taking, still deciding who belongs to him from inside a box.
At Sister Agnes and her humming and her hand on the back of a girl's neck.
At every Brother and every Elder and the checkbook that buys the quiet men who lift women out of windows that don't open.
At Crane most of all, who taught a sixteen-year-old she was a vessel and is right now teaching a federal jury he was just a man who ran an odd church — and who will keep his church and his reach and his Blessed Ones unless somebody who knows the inside of that place stops being careful.
And under the anger, where it's always lived, the other thing. The girl I left. Grace, twenty-four now, a dress being sewn for her this week while the other Blessed Ones stitch and Sister Agnes hums. And now Hannah back beside her, the two of them inside the fence I got over, paying my tab.
I am done being careful. I was done the second Ruiz said gone.
Careful is what I traded ten years of my life for, and careful got a fortress strolled into in daylight and a bookkeeper dead in Boise and a woman run off a dry road in Billings and Hannah lifted out a window, and careful is going to get Grace on that table inside the month.
Careful is a lie they sell you so you'll hold still while they take everything.
I held still for four years inside that fence believing twenty miles of nothing would kill me, and the twenty miles turned out to be eight.
Their distances are always lies. Their dangers are always smaller than the story they tell you to keep you from running at them.
I open the oak door.
My father's at the books. Not turning pages. Pen in his right hand, left hand flat on the open page the way a man rests his hand on a Bible. He reads my face before I've shut the door behind me, and whatever he reads there puts him on his feet faster than his bad knee likes.
"Kiddo."
"They took Hannah."
He doesn't say he's sorry. He knows better than anyone alive that sorry is a thing you say to people who have room to hear it, and I have no room.
He comes around the bar slow and he puts his hand on the back of my neck, light and brief, the way he has since I was a girl, and for one second I let him, I let my father hold the back of my neck the way Sister Agnes once did and ruined for me forever, except his hand is the hand that undid hers, the hand that came at three in the morning, the hand that taught me the pistol every Tuesday for ten years.
And then I do the thing I came out of the office having already decided to do.
I step back from it.
I take my father's hand off the back of my neck, gentle, and I set it down, and I watch the thing happen in his face that I have only seen happen twice — except this time I'm the weather building over the ridge, and he's the one watching it come, and not understanding yet that it's coming for him too.
"Sloane," he says. Careful. "What did you decide?"
"Nothing." The first lie I've ever told my father. It comes out smooth as anything, the cold flat useful thing wearing my voice. "I'm just tired, Dad. I need the house tonight. Just me. Tell Bo to go home, tell the detail I'm down for the night, tell Cole?—"
I can't finish that one. Even cold, even burning, I can't put the lie about Cole into the air in front of my father, because my father hung the oak door and taught me the pistol and came at three in the morning, but Cole is the one who put his mouth on the brand and said not theirs, and there is no version of the cold that makes that easy to throw away.
"Tell Cole what," my father says, very quietly.
"Tell Cole he can stand down tonight." I hold my father's eyes the way I hold a drunk's, level, friendly, meaning it so he'll believe it. "It's been three weeks of every one of you sleeping with one eye open. Nothing's coming tonight. Let everybody rest. That's all."
He looks at me a long time. My father, who has never once not known what I was going to say by the end of a deadline.
And I watch him decide to believe a thing he doesn't believe, because the alternative is to call his daughter a liar to her face in the bar they hauled up out of nothing together, and Walt Mercer would sooner cut off his hand.
"Mm," he says.
It's the saddest sound I've ever heard him make.
He goes back to his books. He doesn't pick up the pen.
And I go back to running my bar like a woman with a future, pouring drinks for people whose names I know and whose nights I keep, smiling at Della and feeding Pete and settling the Coopers' fence line, all of it, the whole warm gold lie of it, while underneath I count the hours to the seam in the detail and the dark road south.
Because here's what it costs, the thing the title of my whole life ought to be.
It costs Hannah, twice. It costs my father a daughter who took his hand off her neck.
And tonight it's going to cost me the one man who walked through the wall on purpose — because Cole reads me better than anyone breathing, and the only way to get past a man who reads you is to hand him a thing so cruel he stops looking close enough to see it's a lie.
I built a wall for ten years to keep from being taken. I'm building this one to keep from taking anybody down with me.
The man who taught himself to look down first is going to look down again before this night is over, and I'm going to be the one who makes him do it, and I'm going to do it cold, and clean, and on purpose — and then I'm going to drive south alone toward the only fence I've got left to climb.
God forgive me. He never has before. I'm not counting on it tonight.