Chapter 9 MAYA #2
Reid comes in first. He's changed into clean clothes, hair still slightly damp, and he stops in the kitchen doorway and looks at what I'm doing.
His eyes move from the pan to the eggs to the bread I've sliced and laid out, and the lines around his mouth soften, the set of his brow eases a fraction, like something behind the surface has just exhaled.
"How's the ankle?" he says.
"Better. Barely notice it."
He watches me for another moment, reading me with that quiet thorough attention that somehow never feels intrusive. "You didn't have to do this."
"It's breakfast, not a triathlon."
He moves to the coffee maker and starts it without comment. His shoulder passes close to mine on the way. He smells like cold water and pine soap.
I flip the bacon and focus on the pan.
Owen and Jace arrive together. I hear them before I see them, Jace's voice carrying down the hall in the particular tone that means he's won whatever argument he was having.
"I'm older," Jace says, dropping into his chair. "And wiser."
"By eleven months," Owen says. "In May we will both be 31."
"Only for a few days. So… still older. Still wiser. Still right about the binding compound."
Owen pulls out his chair without responding, which is its own kind of response. Jace grins, wide and open, dropping into his chair.
I set the eggs on the table. Jace's grin widens, and he drops both elbows on the wood. Owen slides the plate closer to me when I sit down, without looking up, without comment.
Reid refills my coffee before I've registered the cup is light.
And then we're eating. The four of us at this big table in the morning light.
Jace stealing bacon off my plate and winking when I catch him.
Owen eating methodically, one hand on the table, the other turning his coffee cup in small, precise increments.
Reid quiet at the head of the table with a quality of stillness that isn't absence but its opposite, a kind of attention that makes everything it lands on feel worth noticing.
I could get used to this.
I don't let myself finish the thought.
"I should get back today." I've rehearsed this in the shower, and in front of the mirror, and then again before I came downstairs. It sounds almost easy. "I'm well enough, and you've been more than generous. I don't want to overstay."
The men share a look. I've seen this before, this wordless exchange that passes between them like a current, something communicated in the space between glances that I can't decode. Reid to Owen. Owen to Jace. Jace to Reid.
Reid sets down his coffee. "We have something to show you."
"A surprise," Jace adds, with a particular quality of anticipation that makes me slightly nervous in a way I can't explain.
Owen is already standing and leading us to the office.
He opens the door and I watch his face before I look inside, and he is visibly, openly excited in a way I haven't seen from him before. It softens something around his jaw. Makes him look younger.
Then I look inside.
There is a new desk.
It's good wood, solid, set perpendicular to Owen's in the corner nearest the window, catching the light. My laptop is already there, positioned at the center with the charger plugged in and the cord neatly tucked along the baseboard.
"You don't have to leave," Owen says, watching me ."You already have a room. Now you have a place to work. Everything's sorted."
The word sorted lands in my chest, somewhere tender and unprotected.
I start to say something. Some version of I can't, because I have the cabin, I have a lease, I have a plan. But Reid speaks first.
"We talked to Mrs. Smith," he says.
I look at him.
"Told her about the cabin's condition. The damage from the storm. She was reasonable about it." He pauses. "She agreed to break the lease."
Break the lease.
I hear Reid still talking. Something about the state of the cabin, something about how it wasn't fit for living, something about Mrs. Smith's apologies. The sounds arrive at a slight delay, like I'm hearing them from the bottom of a pool.
Break the lease.
They talked to Mrs. Smith.
They decided it.
They looked at my life and my choices and the small, specific arrangement I had made for myself, and they reached over and changed it. Without asking.
I hear Daniel's voice the way I always hear it now. Not as sound but as sensation.
The desk is still perfect. Owen's face is still open, still hopeful. Jace is leaning in the doorway looking pleased, arms crossed.
Something tips over in me and comes down hard.
"You had no right."
The room goes quiet. I watch the expressions change. Owen's hope closes like a door. Jace straightens.
"Maya," Reid starts.
"No." The word comes angry. "You had no right to contact my landlord. You had no right to break my lease. That was my contract. My arrangement. My decision."
"The cabin isn't safe to—"
"Stop." My voice is steady in a way my hands aren't. I press them flat against my thighs so no one can see.
"Do not tell me what is and isn't safe for me.
I am so tired." My throat tightens and I push through it because I will get these words out even if it kills me.
"I am so tired of men hijacking my life.
" I look at them. All three of them. These men who have been kind to me, and right now I cannot access any of that.
The warmth of the last three days is still there but I can't reach it.
"I sacrificed everything. Do you understand?
Everything. I will not let it happen again. "
"That's not what—" Jace starts.
I'm already in the hallway.
My coat is on the hook by the door. I get it on, then the boots, fingers clumsy with the laces, and I don't let myself slow down because if I slow down I will have to feel the thing beneath the anger. The grief of it. The specific grief of a warmth I almost believed in.
I am not doing that here.
I open the door.
The cold hits me like a verdict.
Three days ago the cold almost had me. I was down in it, unable to move, and I had thought, in that flat pragmatic way of someone past fear, that this was probably it.
This time I walk into it myself.