10. Holt
Chapter Ten
HOLT
She comes outside after Corbin’s left and gets in the truck without looking at me.
“Drive, please. Not here.”
I drive. Six leans over from the bench and pushes his nose against her arm. She puts one hand on his head and keeps her eyes on the windshield. The ten minutes up the mountain road are the longest of my life.
She waits until we're inside the cabin.
“Dane Oakley? Recovery specialist. My father hired his firm. And he's been on the phone with you for days apparently. Tell me which part of that is wrong, Holt.”
There's a version of this where I lie again, but I’m tired of doing it.
“None of it's wrong.”
Her breath goes out of her like I slapped her.
“How long?”
“He called the night we… the night we were first together. I called him back the next morning, from the woodshed. That's when I heard the brief. Your father's telling everyone you're off your medication and you're a danger to yourself. There's a bounty on bringing you home.”
“And you knew that. This morning, in the truck, when I asked you to your face.” She's not crying, her voice calm. “You built me a nice snug little pen and you didn't even have the respect to tell me I was in one.”
“I was buying time. If Dane knew you were here he’d tell your father and they’d move.”
“Then you should have told me, and we’d decide together what Dane gets to know! What were you going to do, Holt? Hand me over gently? Drive me somewhere? Pick my hiding place for me? What was the plan?”
I can’t tell her about my cousin Hawk, because I’ve given him my word. I shake my head.
“So… you hadn't decided? My family sells me to a money-laundering operation and the man I'm in love with hadn't decided what to do with me yet. Do you know, even Corbin told me what was going on. But not you.”
“That's not…” I want to tell her it’s not fair, but she’s right.
She goes to the guest room. I stand in the living room listening to her pack her few belongings.
I could stop her, but I don’t move. Stopping her proves every word she just said.
She comes out with the bag on her shoulder, wearing the rain jacket I bought her.
“Nora's coming for me. I'll be at the inn, the reunion's cleared out.” At the door she stops, her back to me, and her voice finally goes quiet. “The worst part is I’m walking out of the one place I felt safe, in the whole world, ever.”
Six follows her onto the porch. She crouches and takes his muzzle in both hands and kisses the top of his head. Then she gets into Nora's Honda, and the taillights go down through the firs until they disappear.
I stand on the porch a long time.
Inside, the cabin feels wrong without her. Six does a circuit, guest room, kitchen, porch door, and then sits in the middle of the floor and looks at me with his ears down.
I don't sleep. I sit at the table looking at the tracker blip until it reaches the inn.
Juliette said she's in love with me. Present tense, in the middle of leaving. She probably doesn't even know she said it.
I put Six in the truck, and drive down the mountain to the inn.
I park on Main across from the church, fifty yards of sight line to the inn's front porch and stand post.
I stand post. Six sighs and puts his head on my thigh.
The silver car comes at half past five. It noses into the space across from the inn with the engine running, and I'm reaching for my door handle when the driver leans forward into the streetlight to scan the porch.
Broad shoulders and a shaved head. A way of checking his mirrors, methodically, that I'd know anywhere on earth, because I sat in a hundred vehicles next to him.
It's not one of Dane's people they've sent up my mountain.
It's Dane.
I'm out of the truck and crossing the empty street before the church clock finishes striking the half hour.