Chapter 30
REID
"It's bullshit and you know it."
Jace is standing by the window. His feet planted, shoulders tight, hands opening and closing at his sides like they're looking for something to grip.
Owen is in his chair. Glasses off. Staring blankly at a point on the wall.
Maya's desk is empty. Has been empty for eighteen hours. The sketchpad is still on the desk where she left it. The pencil cup. The tablet screen dark.
When we came back from returning the snowmobiles, the white truck was in the driveway and three strange men were standing in front of the cabin.
Maya was on the porch steps with her arms wrapped around herself and something in her posture that I read from fifty yards as wrong.
Not the posture of a woman giving directions.
The posture of a woman holding herself together by force.
I saw the lie. It was in her eyes, in the fraction of a second between my question and her answer, in the careful way she held my gaze while saying it.
Maya is many things. She is not a good liar.
The words came out smooth but her body told a different story: her hand gripping the porch railing, her weight shifted back on her heels, the fine tremor in her shoulders.
I stood in the driveway, watched her walk inside and I let her go. I have been making operational decisions all my life and this one might be the worst I've ever made.
Since then. Nothing.
She said she had a headache, needed some space and went to her room. The door closed. I knocked at dinner time. She said she just needed rest. I knocked at breakfast. Same answer.
Eighteen hours of silence.
"We need to do something," Jace says. He's pacing now. Three steps to the window, three steps back. "We can't just sit here while she..."
"What do you wanna do?" Owen's voice is flat. The tone he uses when he's building a wall, brick by brick, word by word. "She asked for space. We're giving her space."
"This isn't space. This is a siege."
"She'll come out when she's ready."
Owen jaw sets. I watch him retreat behind his eyes, the familiar withdrawal, the systematic shutdown of a man who learned at fifteen that the safest response to pain is to stop being reachable. I've seen it before. I'd hoped I wouldn't see it again.
"We knew," Owen says. Quiet now. Not looking at either of us. "We knew from the beginning that she was hiding something. Running from something. We saw the signs and we chose to overlook them because what was happening between us felt more important than whatever she wasn't saying."
The words land in the room and sit there.
"Everybody has secrets," Jace says. Quieter now too, the anger banking down into something heavier. He stops pacing. Faces the window. His reflection in the glass looks older than thirty-one. "I just wish she'd let us in. Whatever it is. We can take it."
The room holds the silence. Three men, each processing the same information in different ways. Jace through motion and frustration. Owen through withdrawal and analysis. Me through the habit of command, the reflexive need to identify the problem and assign a solution.
There is no solution I can assign. The problem is behind a closed door and the closed door is her right and her right is something I will not override no matter how much the silence is costing us.
I look at Jace. He looks at me. We look at Owen.
The thing that passes between us doesn't need words.
It's the shared recognition that we are all, equally and completely, in too deep.
That what started as attraction, became something more and has now reached the part where the depth becomes dangerous, where the water is over our heads and the woman we care about is drowning in a different part of the ocean and we can't reach her.
A knock on the office door.
Soft. Tentative.
This was her office too. Her desk is right there. She worked here every day. And now she is knocking on the door like a guest.
Jace opens it.
"Hey, stranger." He tries. The voice is light, the Jace charm offensive deployed out of reflex. "We were starting to think you'd tunneled out through the floor."
Maya stands in the doorway.
The charm offensive dies. I watch it leave Jace's face as he takes her in. I take her in at the same time and the damage report is immediate: dark circles under her eyes, deep enough to look like bruises. Redness around the lids and the tip of her nose. Lips bitten raw.
She has been crying. For hours. And she did it alone, behind a door, where none of us could reach her.
She doesn't step into the room. She stays in the doorway. Her eyes are on the floor, on the desk, on the window. On everything except us.
"I've been thinking," she says. Her voice is measured, controlled, the careful construction of rehearsal. "About the practical side of things."
Practical. The word lands wrong.
"I've been here almost two months and we never discussed rent." She reaches into the pocket of her sweater and pulls out a folded piece of paper. A check. "This is what I was paying Mrs. Smith. I should have brought it up sooner."
She extends her hand. The check trembles between her fingers, a fine vibration she can't control no matter how controlled her voice is.
Nobody moves. Jace stares at the check like it's a weapon. Owen has gone completely still, his face a mask. I don't move because if I move I will cross the room and take her in my arms and she has asked me not to do that with every inch of distance she's placed between her body and this room.
She sets the check on the desk. Withdraws her hand. Tucks it into her sweater pocket.
"And it's almost April," she says. "Spring.
So the weather will be better and there's no reason I can't move back to my cabin.
" She attempts a laugh. The sound that comes out is the worst thing I've heard in this house.
Thin, hollow, the ghost of the laugh that filled this kitchen a week ago.
"You'll probably be glad to have your space back. "
Jace breaks.
"Why are you doing this?" He steps toward her. The desperation of a man watching something he loves walk away and not understanding why. "Maya, what the hell is this..." He can't finish. His hand goes through his hair. His voice drops. "Was it a joke?"
I stand. Move to the edge of the desk. Closer to her, but not crowding.
"Something happened," I say. "With those men. Something you're not telling us. Whatever it is, you can tell us. You know that."
She doesn't answer. Her eyes are on the floor.
"Maya." I wait until she has no choice but to look at me. Her grey-green eyes meet mine and what I see in them is not the guarded calculation of a woman keeping a secret. It's grief. Raw, open, unbearable.
I know that grief. I've worn it. Every time the right choice and the painful choice were the same choice and you make it because there is no other version of you that could live with the alternative.
She's not leaving because she wants to. She's leaving because she thinks she has to.
The understanding arrives and it doesn't help.
"I think we've earned an explanation." And the emotion I've been managing leaks through, a thin crack in the voice.
She flinches. Small, involuntary. Like the words hit something she was trying to keep still.
She takes a breath. I watch her shoulders pull back. I watch the wall go up, brick by brick, the careful, practiced architecture of a woman who has survived worse than this conversation by making herself smaller and harder and less reachable.
"I'm very thankful," she says. Her voice trembles on the word. "For everything you've done. For taking me in. For making me feel..." She stops. Swallows. Starts again. "But it is what it is."
"Thankful." Owen repeats with bitterness. He says it the way you say a word in a foreign language, testing it, turning it over, finding it inadequate. Finding it insulting.
A tear spills down Maya's cheek. She doesn't wipe it. It tracks from the corner of her eye to her jaw and hangs there and the sight of it breaks something in me.
I move toward her. Instinct. The only response I have to someone in pain: close the distance, be present, be the thing they lean against.
She steps back.
"Don't." Her voice cracks. Please don't."
She turns. She walks out. Her footsteps down the hall, uneven, quick, the sound of someone who is holding it together for exactly as long as it takes to get behind a closed door.
The office holds the three of us.
Jace sits down on the edge of Maya's desk. Slowly, like his legs decided for him.
Owen hasn't moved. His eyes are on the check on the desk. His hands are on the armrests of his chair and his knuckles are white.
I stand where she left me. In the middle of the room. My hands are at my sides. I am not holding anything. There is nothing to hold. There is no task to complete. There is no situation to assess and manage and fix.
There is only a closed door.