ROWE
Wren's car turned onto the county road forty minutes ago, and I've checked my phone eleven times since.
Normal. She's going to walk into that building.
Stand at that exam table. Smile at Paige and see patients in the room where he tore her blouse, and act like nothing happened, because nothing can have happened, because the man it happened with is sitting against a post in his own barn waiting for the mail carrier.
I've spent the whole weekend with her. Every hour of it. Chores and shows and chains and the feather and her laugh filling my trailer like it was built to hold the sound. Two days, and my lungs have forgotten how to work without her in the room.
I know what it is before he says another word.
The trailer sits at the far end of the lot, past the equipment storage, past the generator bank, deliberately outside the paths the workers walk.
Windowless. Unremarkable. Jonah and Cole have spent five days inside it with a truckload of thrift store furniture and a shopping list Silas wrote from my nightmares.
Elias stops at the door. “You don't have to do this today.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then breathe first.”
I breathe. Then I climb the two steps and open the door, and 1999 hits me in the face.
Pine cleaner. Lemon polish. The smell reaches down my throat and closes a fist around something twenty years buried, and my hand locks on the doorframe hard enough that the metal edge bites into my palm.
There's a braided rug. A lamp with a green glass shade. Heavy curtains over walls with no windows. A high-backed chair upholstered in cracked oxblood leather, angled toward the center of the room like it's waiting for a man to sit in it and watch.
A radio on a doily-covered side table murmurs gospel, turned down low.
My scars scream. Both forearms, my torso, my thighs, all at once, the old lines lighting up like someone's tracing them with a live wire.
“Too much?” Elias asks quietly from behind me.
“It's perfect.” My voice comes out toneless.
I make myself step inside. Make my boots cross the rug.
The bolts are in the floor where the chair's sight line lands, discreet steel rings set flush into reinforced planking, and there's a drain Jonah cut that the rug hides.
“He's going to walk in here and lose thirty years off his spine.”
“That's the design.”
I turn in a slow circle. There's a bookshelf with a leather Bible on it, spine out.
A framed cross-stitch on the wall. BE STILL AND KNOW.
Cole's handiwork, and I don't know where he found it, and I don't ask, because my chest is doing something between rage and gratitude and there isn't a word for the mixture.
“The hands,” I say. “Where—”
“Workbench folds down from the wall panel. Left side.” Elias points with the cane. “Jonah tested the restraints against his own grip. They'll hold.”
I look at the folded panel. Behind it is the answer to twenty years of lying awake, and it looks like nothing. Like a cabinet in someone's garage.
The door opens behind us, and Silas comes in with his laptop under one arm, wrinkles his nose at the pine cleaner, and doesn't comment on it, which from Silas is a kind of mercy.
“Two things,” he says. “One, Harlan spent Sunday inside his house.
Didn't go to church. First Sunday he's missed in nine years.
The suspension's eating at him. His curtains stayed shut and his casserole ladies stayed home.” A cold flicker of a smile.
“Two—there are whispers in town this morning.
The good veterinarian didn't show up to work.”
My whole body goes still. “Vance.”
“Vance. His clinic opened at seven. He wasn't there. Staff's been calling him for two hours. His truck's in his driveway, so someone will drive out eventually.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Sooner than the mail carrier. Fine either way. The scene doesn't care who finds it.”
The staff's been calling him.
Wren is the staff.
My phone is in my hand before I've decided anything. I type and delete twice, keeping it clean, keeping it like the text a boyfriend sends and nothing more.
Everything alright at work?
Then I stand in a room built to break a man who broke me, staring at a screen, and Elias and Silas have the grace to talk quietly about drains while I wait.
Three minutes. Four. The gospel radio murmurs. My thumbnail finds the seam of the phone case and worries it.
The screen lights.
Weird morning. Dr. Vance didn't show and nobody can reach him. Paige has called him like ten times. Dr. Reyes says his truck’s home, but he's not answering the door. Sheriff's sending someone by his place. Hope he's okay.
Hope he's okay.
I read it out loud, and Silas's smirk spreads across his face.
“Hope he's okay,” he repeats, savoring it. “Nothing incriminating. Nothing defensive. Concerned coworker, appropriate distance, checkable facts.” He looks at me over the laptop. “I'm proud of her. That's better message discipline than Teddy had his first month, and he's a trained federal agent.”
“I'm telling him you said that,” Elias murmurs.
Silas's grin turns wicked. “Please do. He sulks beautifully.”
“She'll need to be visibly shocked when the news breaks,” Elias adds, back on topic.
He's moved to the oxblood chair and stands behind it, gloved hands resting on its high back, surveying the room the way he surveys the Big Top before a show.
“Shocked, saddened, and busy. Grief with a schedule is unremarkable.” His pale eyes come to me.
“Which raises the question I already know the answer to. She's joining us?”
“She's joining us.” Saying it out loud in this room, of all rooms, does something strange to my ribs—like planting a flag in poisoned ground. “Staff vet. Full time. She's giving her notice as soon as the Vance situation settles and there's someone to give notice to. She travels with the menagerie.”
“With the menagerie,” Elias repeats dryly.
“With me.”
“There it is.” He almost smiles. “Deke will be insufferable. He's already planning her breakfasts a week out. There's a list on the prep board.”
“She fixed his dog's ear,” I say in explanation.
Elias gives me a meaningful look. “She fixed all of us in a way,” he says, mild as anything, and lets go of the chair.
Marek is suddenly inside the trailer. No footsteps on the metal stairs, no creak. He surveys the room once—the lamp, the rug, the cross-stitch—and his lip curls into a sneer. Then he looks straight at Silas.
“The dog.”
Silas blinks. “What about the dog?”
“Don't forget about him. We take him the same night.”
“It's a Labrador, Marek,” Silas says. “It's not a witness. It doesn't need to be extracted under cover of darkness like it's carrying microfilm.”
“The same night.”
“He'll bark at us the whole—”
“He won't.” Marek drifts to the side table and turns the gospel radio off with one fingertip, and the trailer goes quiet. “He'll come to me.”
Silas looks at Elias. Elias looks at me. I shrug because Marek has never once explained the things that matter to him, and he's never once been wrong about them either.
“What is it about this dog?” Silas finally asks. “Genuinely. You've mentioned it in every meeting. You put it on the whiteboard. You wrote DOG and underlined it twice. It's a Labrador named Beau who's never done anything except love a monster who doesn't deserve it.”
Marek turns his head and looks at Silas the way he looks at a card he's just flipped.
“You just answered your own question, brother,” he says, and glides back out into the daylight.
The three of us stand in the parsonage smell, staring at the empty doorway.
“I hate it when he does that,” Silas mutters.
“You love it when he does that,” Elias says.
“I love it and I hate it. Both things are true.” Silas heads for the door, then pauses to look back at me. “Text your girl something normal. Boring. Ask what she wants for dinner.”
He leaves. Elias follows, and at the threshold, he stops and looks back at me standing alone in the middle of the room built out of my worst memories, and whatever he sees on my face, he doesn't question it.
“Three days,” he says, and steps out.
I stand there another minute in silence. Then I pull out my phone.
What do you want for dinner?
The reply comes in under a minute, and I'm smiling before I finish reading it.
Whatever Deke's making. Tell him I said hi. Tell the peacocks nothing, they've done enough.
I close the trailer door behind me and walk back toward the light.