Chapter 3 #2
He marches me back out through the house and out a side door into the cold, one hand fisted in my collar, steering me across the grounds like a dog that can't be trusted off the leash.
The thing turns out to be a woodpile.
At the far edge of the yard there's a long stone shed with its doors thrown open. Beside it sits a mountain of split logs, dumped in a heap taller than me, and running along the shed wall is a low stone store meant to hold them stacked. Empty.
"Move it." Killian toes a log toward my feet.
"All of it. Into the store, stacked neat, not thrown.
I catch one log out of place, you start the row again.
" He looks at the pile, then at me, and it's clear he's enjoying the size of the gap between the two.
"Should keep your hands busy while your mom decides if you're worth a phone call. "
There's a shape in the shadow of the shed, and it moves, and it's Calder—sleeves shoved up, a coil of wire in his hands, bent over a workbench doing something that has nothing to do with me. Cut grass and clean air, cool under the woodsmoke, his scent hits me and I inhale deep.
He glances at the pile, glances at me, and goes back to his work. Not my problem, the glance says.
"Calder'll keep an eye on you." Killian's already walking off, backward, so he can keep grinning at me. "Do yourself a favor and don't run. He's faster than he looks, and he's in a mood."
Then it's just the pile, and the cold, and the small metal sounds of Calder working.
I start. There's nothing else to do, so I start.
Bend, lift, carry, stack. The logs are heavier than they look and my arms were finished before I picked up the first one—two nights without sleep, a day without food, that stone of a pill still turning in me.
I keep my breathing even and my face blank and I move.
I lose count of the logs early, then stop caring what the count was.
The pile goes down by inches. It's the strangest thing—the morning's cold enough that my hands never warm, my fingers stiff and slow on the bark, but I'm sweating anyway, a thin cold sweat that runs down into my eyes.
Twice I have to stop and drag my sleeve across my forehead, then blow into my cupped hands and rub them together, and it does nothing; they've been cold since the cellar and they stay that way.
At some point, a splinter drives up under my thumbnail and I curse under my breath but don't stop for it. I just keep lifting. My heart's found a flutter I don't like, catching and skipping every few beats, and the trick with that is not to fight it—go slow, go steady, don't let it feel you panic.
So I go slow. I go steady. I don't let any of it reach my face.
For a long time neither of us says anything.
"You're going to hurt yourself," Calder says eventually, not looking up from the bench. "You're lifting with your back."
I don't answer. I don't have air to spare on it.
"Suit yourself." Wire clips. A pause. "Nobody's timing you, you know. He said neat. He didn't say fast. You could pace it and last the day instead of blowing out in an hour."
Ten logs. Fifteen. The yard tips gently sideways and rights itself, and I set a hand on the cold stone and wait for it to level out, and I make it look like I'm squaring the stack.
"Or don't." He's watching me now; I can feel it on the back of my neck. "You always work like the devil's counting, or is that just for us?"
"I'm fine."
"Sure." He goes quiet a moment, and I think that's the end of it. "Here's what I can't figure out. You."
I keep stacking.
He continues. "A guy gets dragged out of his home by three men he's never met, thrown in a cellar, told he owes a fortune he never saw—that guy screams. He asks for a lawyer.
He threatens to call the cops the second he's near a phone.
He asks, at some point, what the hell he's even accused of.
" A beat, flat and precise, and it's worse than any of Killian's shoving. "You never asked. You just went quiet."
My hands don't stop but everything in me goes tight. Because he's right, and there's no way to make it look like anything but guilt.
"You didn't ask what she took," he says, "because you don't need to. You already know."
"Maybe I already know it won't matter what I say." It's out before I can stop it, low and cracked, more than I meant to give him. "Maybe I've never once in my life had somebody believe me, so I stopped wasting the breath."
That lands somewhere. He doesn't answer right away. When I glance over he's got that flat, patient look again, arms folded, reading me like a page—but there's a small line between his brows now that wasn't there a second ago.
Then it smooths out, and he shakes his head, and reaches for the version that's easier to hold.
"Kill thinks you're a liar," he says. "Scared little liar, same as your mother, just worse at it." He picks the wire back up. "Sad thing is, standing here watching you flinch at a woodpile, I'm having a hard time telling him he's wrong."
Scared. He says it like it settles something.
Like a person who flinches must have a reason to, and the reason must be guilt.
I want to tell him that some of us learned to go still and quiet because still and quiet was the only thing that ever kept us breathing, that it's a survival skill, not a signed statement.
I don't.
I pick up another log, and my heart skips and catches, skips and catches, and I count my breaths and say nothing.
We work like that a while longer, him at the bench, me hauling, the pile going down by inches.
My shirt's stuck to my back with cold sweat and my hands have stopped feeling like mine.
I've almost found the rhythm of just enduring it when a voice cuts across the yard from the open back door—Killian, calling Calder's name, something about the phone, about Dad wanting him.