Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
SAUL
I keep a list.
Not official, nothing in any file. Just a notebook I’ve had since my first year as a Marshal, the pages soft now from handling.
Forty-three names. Forty-three people I’ve helped disappear into new lives, new identities, new versions of themselves that might keep them breathing a little longer.
I don’t know why I started keeping it. Maybe because the job makes it too easy to forget that these are people, not cases. Not file numbers. Not problems to be solved and moved along.
Forty-three names, and I remember something about each of them.
The accountant who cried for three days straight and then asked me to teach her to shoot.
The kid, barely nineteen, who kept a photo of his dog hidden in his wallet even though I told him he couldn’t.
The grandmother who baked bread every morning in her new apartment because the smell reminded her of home.
I thought I’d seen every version of this. Every way a person falls apart when you take away everything that made them who they were.
But I’ve never met anyone like Stevie Reeves.
It’s 2 AM and I’m lying in a hotel room that smells like industrial cleaner and other people’s choices, staring at a ceiling I couldn’t describe if you paid me, and all I can think about is the way she looked when I left her in that apartment.
Not crying. That might have been easier.
Just standing there, arms wrapped around herself, looking at me like I was the last real thing she’d ever see.
I’ve been doing this job for eight years. I know how to leave. Know how to close the door and drive away and not look back, because looking back doesn’t help anyone.
You do what you can, you set them up as best you can, and then you let them build whatever life they’re going to build without you.
That’s the job. That’s how it works.
But something about leaving her there felt like abandoning a small animal in a cardboard box on the side of the road.
I roll over. Punch the pillow into a different shape. Close my eyes and see her face anyway.
She noticed everything during intake. That’s what keeps snagging in my head.
Most witnesses are so deep in shock they can barely sign their own names. They sit where you put them, answer what you ask them, stare at walls like the walls might have answers.
Stevie noticed the agents. I could see her cataloging them, filing away details about men specifically trained to be forgettable. She noticed the room.
She noticed me.
The way she looked at me when I walked in, those dark eyes tracking across my face like she was memorizing me for later. Like I was something worth remembering.
I’m not used to being seen like that.
My ex-wife used to say I was impossible to know. That I kept myself at a distance even when I was standing right next to her.
She wasn’t wrong. There’s something in me that’s better at taking care of strangers than people who actually love me. Easier to show up for someone who doesn’t expect anything beyond the job description.
Stevie doesn’t expect anything from me. She made that clear when she thanked me for staying during her haircut, like basic human decency was some kind of gift.
It shouldn’t have affected me.
It did anyway.
I give up on sleep around five-thirty. Shower. Dress. Stand at the window watching the sky go from black to gray to something that might eventually be morning.
By six I’m at the coffee shop down the street, ordering two large coffees and a bag of bagels because I don’t know what she likes and it seems safer to bring options. Everything bagel, plain, cinnamon raisin. Cream cheese on the side.
I’m overthinking bagels.
That’s probably a sign of something I don’t want to examine too closely.
The drive to her apartment takes eleven minutes. I know because I count, the way I always count. Minutes between locations. Exits in every room. Seconds it takes to draw my weapon if I need to.
The job trains you to notice certain things. Threats. Escape routes. The weight of a room and whether it feels safe.
What the job doesn’t train you for is noticing the way a woman’s hands shake when she’s trying to hold herself together. The way her voice goes flat when she’s checked out of her own body. The way she flinches, just slightly, when you call her by a name that isn’t hers.
She answers on the third knock.
She’s rumpled and soft-looking in a way that makes something protective tighten in my chest. And then something else that’s decidedly not protective.
“Morning,” I say, holding up the coffee. “Thought you might need this.”
She blinks at me. Takes the cup with both hands, wrapping her fingers around it. The thought of what else she might need to hold onto surfaces before I can stop it.
“Thank you.” Her voice is quiet. Flat. The voice of someone going through motions because motions are all she has left.
I follow her inside. The apartment looks exactly the same as when I left it. Her bag is still by the door, still zipped, still holding everything she owns in the world. The kitchen counters are empty.
The silence has a weight to it, like the air has given up.
“Did you eat anything?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
She looks at the bagels like she’s forgotten what food is for. “I’m not hungry.”
“You need to eat anyway.”
I don’t make it a suggestion. I find a plate in the cabinet, put a bagel on it, spread cream cheese because it occurs to me she might not have the energy to do it herself.
Set it in front of her at the small table that came with the apartment, the kind of table designed by someone who’s never had a real meal in their life.
She sits. Stares at the bagel.
I sit across from her with my own coffee and wait.
This is something I’ve learned over the years. You can’t rush people through grief. Can’t push them to be okay faster than they’re capable of being okay. All you can do is sit with them, be present, let them know they’re not alone in whatever darkness they’re swimming through.
After a long moment, she picks up the bagel. Takes a bite. Chews like it’s a job she’s been assigned.
It’s something. Not enough, but something.
“I have your work login information,” I tell her, pulling the folder from my jacket. “You start Monday. Data entry, medical billing codes. Straightforward stuff. They email assignments, you complete them, submit. Everything’s remote.”
She nods. Doesn’t look at the folder.
“Beth.”
The flinch again. Subtle, but there.
Shit.
“Stevie,” I correct, even though I shouldn’t. Even though the whole point is for her to become Beth, to let Stevie go, to build a life that doesn’t include the name she was born with. “You with me?”
Her eyes meet mine.
There’s something raw in them.
“I’m trying,” she whispers.
“I know.”
We sit in silence while she works through half the bagel. I drink my coffee and pretend I’m not watching her, not cataloging the way her shoulders curve inward, the way her fingers tap against the table in a pattern that looks like anxiety given physical form.
“What do you need?” I ask finally. “To feel more settled. To make this place feel less...”
“Beige?” she offers, and there’s the faintest ghost of humor in her voice.
It’s nothing. A scrap of dry wit. It’s not much. But it’s enough to make breathing easier.
“Yeah.”
She looks around the apartment. Takes in the blank walls, the empty surfaces, the complete absence of anything that suggests a human being lives here.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I need.”
But her hands are still tapping that anxious rhythm.
“What did you do before?” I ask. “When you were stressed. Before all this.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Something crosses her face, memory or longing or both.
“I baked.”
Of course she did.
“What do you need to bake?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Everything. The kitchen doesn’t have anything.”
“Make me a list.”
“Saul, you don’t have to.”
“Make me a list,” I repeat. “I’ll get it.”
The grocery store is twenty-three minutes away. I know because I count. And also because it gives me twenty-three minutes to wonder what the hell I’m doing.
This isn’t in my job description. Witness protection means keeping her safe, keeping her hidden, making sure she has the resources to build a new life.
It doesn’t mean buying baking supplies because she looked lost in her own kitchen.
But I keep driving anyway.
The store’s one of those massive suburban warehouses, the kind with fluorescent lighting and too many choices and aisles that seem to go on forever.
I find the baking section and stop.
Flour. There are at least fifteen different kinds of flour. All-purpose, bread flour, cake flour, pastry flour, whole wheat, gluten-free, organic, unbleached. I stare at them like they might rearrange themselves into something that makes sense.
I pick up the all-purpose. Put it back. Pick up the unbleached. Read the back of the bag like it’s going to tell me which one Stevie would want.
This is ridiculous. I’ve disarmed men twice my size. I’ve talked witnesses down from panic attacks, relocated families across the country, testified in federal court without breaking a sweat.
And I’m standing in a grocery store paralyzed by flour.
“Need help?”
I turn. A woman about my age is loading sugar into her cart. She has kind eyes and the particular expression of someone who’s watched a man drown in baking supplies before.
“Yeah,” I admit. “I need to get baking supplies for someone. She stress-bakes. I have no idea what I’m doing.”
The woman’s smile widens, warm and uncomplicated. “Okay. What does she like to bake?”
“Cookies, I think.” I adjust my watch, aware that I probably look exactly as out of my depth as I feel. “She mentioned peanut butter chocolate chip.”
“Good choice.” The woman starts pulling things off shelves, her movements confident and practiced. “All-purpose flour, that’s your baseline. White sugar for sweetness, brown sugar for chewiness and depth. You’ll want both.”