11. Ten
Sarah had her back to the door when Winston let me into his office, and for one selfish second, I was glad. It gave me time to look at her before she looked at me.
She stood near the window with her arms folded tightly across her chest, staring out at the parking lot. She wore jeans and an old gray cardigan despite the heat, and her hair was shorter than the last time I'd seen her, and more silver ran through it.
Eleven months had happened to her while I was walking, then chained inside a pen waiting for somebody to decide how they wanted to hurt me next.
My hand closed around the folded report in my pocket.
Winston stayed beside me. "You ready?"
No. "Yeah."
He shut the door hard enough for the latch to catch.
Sarah turned.
Her eyes moved over my face, my beard, the shirt hanging loose around my shoulders. She looked at my hands next, as if those might prove I was real when the rest of me didn't.
"Hey, Sare."
Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. Then she crossed the room and hit me. She caught my upper arm instead of my face. She hit me again in the same place, harder, and I let her. The third swing never landed. She twisted a hand into my shirt and leaned against me.
The new stitches pulled when I wrapped my arms around her. I held on anyway.
"You asshole." The words came wet against my chest. "You absolute fucking asshole."
"I know."
"I looked everywhere."
"I know."
"No, you don't." She shoved away far enough to look up at me. Tears ran down her face, but she was still gripping my shirt with both hands. "You don't know what I did. You don't know what it's like every time the phone rings and some cop asks if you have dental records."
I'd matched dental records to bodies. I'd never once thought about who answered the phone.
Sarah hit my arm once more. "Eleven months, John."
"I'm sorry."
"That doesn't cover it."
"No."
"I thought you were dead."
Her voice broke on the last word. She pressed her face against my chest again, and whatever I'd been holding together since I walked through the door gave way.
I put one hand over the back of her head. "I'm not dead."
She made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. "I can see that."
We stood there until my side started throbbing hard enough to make my arm shake. Sarah felt it and pulled back immediately. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Bullshit." She opened my shirt before I could stop her.
The dressing over my ribs showed beneath it, and she glared up at me. "What happened to you?"
"It's a long story."
"You've been missing for almost a year. I cleared my schedule." She took my hand and led me toward the chairs in front of Winston's desk. "Sit down and start talking."
Sarah stayed on her feet while I lowered myself into the chair. She opened my shirt far enough to examine the dressing, then looked at the bruising on my ribs and the bite on my shoulder.
"Who treated you?"
"A man named Sierra."
"Is he a doctor?"
"No, but he knows what he's doing."
Her mouth tightened, but she let the shirt fall closed.
I told her the rest without dragging her through every mile. The clinic signed away. One morning, a bottle of water, no plan to be gone. Then the walking, and then the Javelinas.
Sarah sat sometime during the telling. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at them while I talked. She interrupted once, when I admitted I had passed plenty of places with working phones.
"You could've called me."
"I know."
She nodded and let me continue.
When I finished, nothing in the office made a sound except the air conditioner rattling in the window.
"Five months," she said.
"Yeah."
She looked at my wrists. The worst of the damage from the cuffs had started to heal, but the marks remained.
"I'm not going to ask what they did to you, but I imagine it wasn't pleasant."
"Thank you."
Sarah stood and walked to the window. She kept her back to me while she wiped her face.
I wanted to get up and put my arms around her. That was what I would've done before Little John died. Before I went walking. Sarah would cry, I would hold her, and eventually she would start laughing because neither of us knew what else to do.
This time, I had caused it.
"I wasn't trying to leave you," I said.
She looked over her shoulder. "You still did."
Sarah turned back to the window. Coyote stood beneath the light near Winston's cruiser, Nimue around his neck and both hands in his pockets. He watched the road instead of the office, but he had tracked the movement behind the glass.
Sarah followed my gaze. "Is that one of the people from the ranch?"
"His name is Coyote."
"The one who found you?"
"Yeah."
She studied him through the window. "He looks like he's waiting for somebody to try taking you."
"He is."
Her eyes came back to me. "Should I be worried about him?"
I thought about the report crackling in Coyote's pocket while I told him I wanted to see her. I thought about his knife against the cinch, and about him staying where I put him when everything in him wanted to close the distance.
"Not for the reason you think."
"That isn't reassuring."
Sarah came back to me and crouched between my knees.
She pressed two fingers beneath my chin, turning my face toward the light the way she used to when I came home from school with a split lip.
Her hand smelled like the lemon lotion she kept beside her kitchen sink.
She looked at the fading bruise near my temple, then opened my shirt again.
She held her fingers above the dressing without touching it.
"How far is this ranch from a hospital?"
"Far enough that you wouldn't approve."
"I already don't approve." She stood and picked up her purse from beside Winston's desk. She pulled her keys out of the front pocket. "Come on."
"Where are we going?"
"Home."
My stomach pulled tight.
The last time I slept at Sarah's house was the week after Little John's funeral.
She put me in the guest room and left the hall light on like I was a child afraid of the dark.
I lay awake under the ceiling fan, reaching toward an empty space that had never held him, and I hated it.
I hated lying in a bed that didn't smell like him, living in a house without his things, letting her nurse me.
I could see that room better than the one I sat in. The blue quilt. The clock with numbers bright enough to reach the opposite wall. Sarah moving quietly in the hallway because she thought I was asleep.
I put both hands on the arms of the chair. "I'm not going to Socorro."
Sarah stopped with the strap of her purse over one shoulder. "You need a bed."
"I have one."
"At the ranch?"
"Yeah."
"Near the man outside?"
I looked through the window. Coyote had moved closer to the building. He stood near the edge of the light, watching the road with one hand resting on his knife.
"Next to him," I said.
Sarah followed my gaze. Her hand closed around the keys.
"You have fresh stitches, no phone, and nothing with you except the clothes you're wearing." She looked down at my boots. Dirt from the cave had dried around the soles. "I found you less than an hour ago, and you expect me to watch you leave with people I've never met."
The chair creaked under my hands. I wanted to take the keys from her, carry her bag to the car, and let her decide what happened next. Sarah knew how to take care of me without making it feel like work. That was part of the problem.
If I went with her, she would put me in the guest room and bring me food. Tomorrow she would find a doctor. The next day, she would ask whether I wanted to see the house or visit the clinic. She wouldn't mean any of it as pressure. Every step would still lead backward.
At Pae Saco, nobody knew who I had been before the pit. Sierra fed the man sitting at his table. Rafe asked what I wanted instead of telling me what I ought to want. Coyote wanted to lock me in a cave and had finally learned there were consequences for trying.
I could deal with that. I couldn't deal with the blue quilt.
"I'm not ready to go back," I said.
Sarah's grip tightened around her keys. "I'm not asking you to move in. Come home tonight. Sleep somewhere clean. Let me get you examined tomorrow."
"I can't."
Some of the fight left her face, but her shoulders stayed square. "Can't come with me," she said, "or can't go back there?"
"Back there."
She looked down at the keys in her hand. She worked her thumb over the worn plastic fob while the air conditioner rattled behind us.
Then she put the keys back into her purse. "Where exactly is Pae Saco?"
"I can't give you the address without asking Rafe."
"Then ask him."
"Sarah."
She pulled the purse strap off her shoulder and dropped the bag onto Winston's desk.
"You don't want to come home with me? Fine." She folded her arms and looked through the window at Coyote. "Then I'm staying with you."
"Before you decide, there's more you need to know."
Sarah's purse stayed on Winston's desk while I told her about the shed and the tracker Joe found under the motorcycle.
Sarah came around the desk and opened my shirt again. Her fingers stopped beside the dark bruising below the dressing. "This happened there?"
"Yeah."
"And you want to go back."
"Yes."
She pulled my shirt closed harder than necessary. "Then I want to see exactly where you're going. If it's as bad as I'm imagining, I'll drag you to Socorro myself."
"You're not dragging me anywhere."
"You're injured. I could probably manage."
I laughed, and pain cut across my ribs.
Sarah's hand settled against my side. She didn't touch the wound. She just stood close enough for me to feel the heat of her palm through my shirt.
"You could get hurt there," I said.
"So could you."
"That's different."
"It always is with you."
Her fingers curled into the fabric. She had spent all those months searching for me. Asking her to leave now would only give her another place where she couldn't see what was happening.
I covered her hand with mine. "Let me ask Rafe."
Winston was waiting in the hallway. When I opened the door, he looked at Sarah's purse on his desk.
"She wants to stay at Pae Saco," I said.
"Course she does. Woman drove four hours on a maybe."
Sarah leaned around me. "Is that a problem?"
"It might be." Winston took out his phone. "Rafe's gonna want to hear that John invited you, not that you invited yourself."
He made the call and handed me the phone.
"You tell her what happened this morning?" Rafe asked.
"Yes."
"She understands we can't promise nothing else will happen?"
"She's standing right here."
Rafe was quiet for a moment. "All right," he said. "Put her on."
Sarah took the phone from my hand. Rafe gave her the conditions himself, and she listened without interrupting, her eyes on mine.
Winston would drive her. Her car and her phone would stay behind.
She would not share the route or the ranch's location.
When Rafe finished, she agreed to everything and handed the phone back.
Winston opened the exterior door. Coyote stood directly outside.
He looked at my face, then at Sarah's hand twisted into my shirt. His jaw tightened, but he stayed where he was.
Sarah stepped onto the porch, taking in Nimue around his neck, the knife against his thigh, and the dried rabbit blood on his hands.
She tightened her hand around my arm. "You're the one who found him?"
"Yeah."
"Then I owe you a thank-you."
Coyote's eyes moved to me. The porch light caught the dried rabbit blood across his knuckles and the red mark where my beard had rubbed his mouth raw.
"You don't owe me anything," he said.
"I spent eleven months asking strangers to help me find him." Sarah's voice tightened, but she held Coyote's gaze. "You're the one who did."
Coyote stared down at his hands and then folded them behind his back. "You're welcome."
Sarah nodded once. "I'm coming to the ranch."
Coyote's head snapped up. "No."
My fingers closed around the porch rail. Coyote turned toward me. His shoulders had gone tight, and one hand hovered near the knife at his thigh.
"Coyote, I invited her."
The silence stretched long enough for Sarah to shift closer to me. Coyote watched the movement, then looked at my face, jaw working. "You want her there?"
"Yes."
He gave me a hard look before he stepped away from the door. "Then she comes."
My hand loosened around the rail.
Coyote still wanted to stop her. He tracked Sarah across the porch, and his hand curled each time she touched me.
The wanting hadn't changed. He'd just set my answer above it, and he stood there holding both.
Something under my sternum let go a notch.
I wasn't ready to forgive him yet, but for the first time since the cave, I pulled a full breath all the way down.
Sarah sealed her phone into the pouch Winston handed her and watched him lock it in the safe. Then she came back to my side.
Coyote waited at the bottom of the porch steps. Sarah moved to my injured side and put one hand beneath my elbow, and I let her help me down the steps.
Linc was waiting in the ranch truck at the edge of the lot. Winston opened the rear door of his cruiser, but Sarah reached it first.
"You're riding with me," she said.
I looked back at Coyote.
He stood beside the truck with Nimue lifting her head from his shoulder. He had promised nothing about distance, and I knew he would follow us all the way to Pae Saco. I wanted him to.
That was the part I couldn't set down with the anger. I wanted his hand under my arm instead of Sarah's. I wanted him close enough to smell the blood on his skin. Furious as I still was about what he'd done to keep me, I would have taken "mine" whispered against my ear.
"Go on," he said. "I'll be right behind you in Linc's truck."
I climbed into Winston's cruiser. Sarah climbed in beside me and helped move my injured thigh before she shut the door.
Linc's truck pulled out behind us. I found its headlights in the side mirror before we reached the first intersection. They stayed there through every turn.
Sarah took my hand. Her fingers fit between mine, sharper in the knuckles than when we were children crossing streets. The seat on the other side of me stayed empty. He could've taken it. He'd put a whole truck between us instead, and I knew what holding that distance cost him.
"Everything's going to be all right now," she said, and squeezed my hand.
I looked back at the headlights holding steady behind us and hoped she was right.