Chapter 2 #2
"They surely do," she says, entirely unconvinced, and slides the pie onto a plate anyway, and I decide not to argue the point any further, because arguing with Rosalind has never once in the history of Clover Ridge gone well for the person doing the arguing.
I watch from the counter as June's face does something soft and surprised when the pie shows up unbidden, watch her ask Rosalind about it and get a shrug and a "just felt like it, honey" in response, and something in my chest eases at the sight of it, small as it is.
She's not used to unearned kindness. Every little piece of it I can arrange without my fingerprints showing feels like laying one more stone in the foundation I'm quietly building under her.
The guys notice, eventually, because the guys notice everything about each other; it's the nature of living this close to a dozen other men who all think they're subtle.
"You got a thing for the new girl," Tank says one night, not unkindly, more like a man announcing weather.
"I don't have a thing."
"You've rearranged the diner's seating chart for a woman you haven't said six words to. That's a thing, brother."
I don't answer that because there's no good answer that isn't a confession, and I'm not ready to confess anything, mostly because I haven't fully admitted it to myself yet either.
"You gonna at least tell us her name?" Tank presses, grinning, because Tank has never once in his life let a subject go before he's wrung every drop of entertainment out of it.
"June."
"June what?"
"Just June, far as I know."
Tank raises an eyebrow. "That's either real mysterious or you're bad at asking questions, and I know for a fact you're not bad at asking questions."
"Some things you don't ask. You wait for them to be offered."
That gets a longer look from Tank than I expect, some flicker of actual understanding under the teasing. "Huh," he says. "Never figured you for the patient type with a woman. Patient with everything else, sure. Never a woman."
"First time for everything."
"Guess so." He claps me on the back hard enough to stagger a smaller man and wanders off toward the bar, satisfied enough with that answer to let the subject drop, at least for tonight.
But June — I keep calling her that even in my head, out of respect for the fiction she needs — starts to notice.
I can tell by the way her shoulders come down half an inch when she takes that back booth and finds it clear.
I can tell by the way she stopped flinching quite as hard at the bell over the diner door.
I can tell by the fact that on day nine, walking back to her room under a streetlight that wasn't lit two weeks ago, she pauses under it for one extra second, looking up like she's trying to figure out if it's a coincidence.
It isn't. Nothing about what I'm building around her is a coincidence. I'm just careful enough that it looks like one.
She's never had anyone stand between her and the dark without wanting something for it — I don't know that for a fact yet, not the specifics, but I know the shape of a person who's learned that lesson the hard way, because I built the same wall myself once, out of the same kind of rubble.
I don't need her to know it's me. Not yet. I just need her to keep noticing that the world got a little safer around the edges, and to start wondering why.
Wondering is how trust starts. I know that better than almost anybody.
There's a particular evening, maybe two weeks into all this, that sticks with me more than the others.
I'm at the counter, coffee going cold in front of me the way I let it these days when I'm using the cup more as a prop than a drink, and June comes in later than usual, hair damp from rain that caught her halfway down Main, and for a second — just a second, before she catches herself — she looks lost. Not scanning-for-threats lost. Just lost, the way a person looks when they've been carrying something heavy for so long they've forgotten what it feels like to put it down even for a night.
I don't go to her. That's not the play yet.
But I ask Rosalind, quiet, to make sure her usual booth's got a towel waiting and her coffee's the good stuff, not the pot that's been sitting since four, and I watch from the corner as she settles in, and I watch some of that lost look ease off her shoulders one degree at a time.
It's such a small thing. A towel. A fresh pot of coffee. It shouldn't matter this much that it matters to me, but it does, and I've stopped pretending otherwise, at least to myself, even if I'm still keeping the rest of the club in the dark about just how much.
Later that same week, I catch her watching me the way I've been watching her — quick, assessing, gone before I can hold the eye contact.
It's not suspicion anymore, or not only suspicion.
There's something curious underneath it now, something that wasn't there the first few days, and I let myself feel a small, careful flicker of hope about that, the kind of hope I haven't let myself feel about anything in longer than I care to admit.
Knox catches me smiling faintly into my coffee one morning and doesn't say a word, just gives me a long, knowing look and goes back to his own breakfast, and I decide that's about as much scrutiny as I can handle for one day.
I think, some nights, about what happens if I'm wrong about her.
If the danger I've read in her posture and her eyes turns out to be something uglier than I've guessed — a debt she skipped out on, a man she wronged instead of one who wronged her, some version of events where I've built a fortress around the wrong person entirely.
It's possible. I've been wrong before, badly, expensively wrong, and the wreckage of that mistake is the whole reason I built this careful life in the first place.
But I don't think I'm wrong. Six years of reading people for a living — reading them because I have to, because the alternative got two brothers hurt — has given me an instinct I trust more than almost anything else about myself, and that instinct says June Kelly is exactly what she looks like: a woman who did nothing wrong except see something she shouldn't have, and who's been paying for it every day since with a fear that never quite lets her rest.
I intend to be right about this one. I intend to make sure of it, one quiet, careful gesture at a time, until she's safe enough to stop running and start actually living somewhere, whether or not that somewhere ends up including me.
That last part matters to me more than I expected it to, and I let myself sit with that discomfort instead of pushing it away, because pushing away the things that matter is exactly the habit that turned me into the loneliest brother in a clubhouse full of them, and I'm not sure, anymore, that I want to keep being that.