Chapter 4
ISLA
He was carving my name.
I was sitting at the table with my notepad while Clark sat across from me with the piece of juniper and his knife, and I watched his hands move without appearing to, and I thought: he knows exactly what he's making.
He just wasn't telling me.
"You said you've done this — the extraction work — for eight years," I said.
He didn't look up from the wood. "Seven."
"What were you doing before?"
A pause. Short, but present. "Similar work. Different context."
"Military?"
He glanced up. "You ask a lot of questions for someone who's been told this is a no-information environment."
"I'm asking about you, not the operation."
"Same thing."
"It's not." I set down my pen. "I've spent the last three years thinking very carefully about the difference between institutional information and personal information. They're not the same."
He looked at me for a moment. The firelight caught the angle of his jaw, the precise stillness of his hands when he wasn't carving. Then he went back to the wood.
"Army," he said. "Special operations. Twelve years."
"And then this."
"And then this."
"Why?"
"The work made sense." He made a careful cut along the grain. "I'm good at it."
"People are good at lots of things they don't choose to build their lives around."
"No one builds their life. They make a series of decisions, and the accumulation becomes what they did with it."
I looked at him. He said it without weight — no philosophy, no performance. Just the factual observation of a person who'd thought about it and arrived somewhere.
"That's either very pragmatic," I said, "or very sad."
"It's accurate."
"Accurate things can still be sad."
He glanced up again. This time he held it for a moment longer than the conversation required.
"Yes," he said. "They can."
The fire crackled. Outside, the wind had picked up an hour ago and was moving through the trees in long, cold waves.
I was warm. I noticed that specifically — I was inside a cabin in the mountains with no cell service and a man I'd known for eighteen hours, and I was warm, and it wasn't entirely because of the woodstove.
"The book you're reading," he said. "You've read it before."
I looked at the book on the table. It was a novel — one I'd taken off his shelf because the spine was worn through and I'd wanted to know what he read. "How can you tell?"
"You didn’t start from the beginning."
I'd opened it at what felt like the right place. Chapter fourteen. I did that with books I loved — dropped into them sideways, entered through a familiar door.
"Guilty," I said. "It's one of my favorites."
"Why?"
"Because the heroine solves her own problem. The man just stands there and is honest with her, which is more radical than it sounds, and everything follows from that."
His hands stilled on the wood.
"That is more radical than it sounds," he said.
We looked at each other across the table, and I felt the current of it — low and steady, the particular pull between two people who are going to stop pretending they don't feel it. Not now. But soon.
I picked up my pen. He went back to the wood.
The wind moved through the timber, and the fire talked to itself in the woodstove, and we sat in the same space and did different things, and somehow that was the most comfortable I'd been in years.