Chapter 7
CLARK
I was up at five.
Old habit, older than the military, older than any of it. I lay still for a moment in the grey dark, listened to Isla breathe beside me, and felt the particular quality of a morning that had a different weight from the ones before it.
I got up without waking her. Put the fire up. Made coffee.
I took the juniper out of my coat pocket and sat at the table with it and the knife and looked at what I'd done.
The letter was almost finished. The I, clean and precise in the grain of the wood, the strokes following where the wood had wanted them.
The disc shape was right — palm-sized, slightly convex on the back so it sat comfortably in the hand.
I'd leave the grain of the exterior natural.
The cut face smooth, the carved letter just deep enough to collect shadow, to be readable by touch.
I put the knife down.
I'd been telling myself for two days that this was habit. That I carved people's names in things because I'd been carving for thirty years, and the wood found its own direction. That it didn't mean anything specific.
I picked up my coffee and stopped lying to myself.
I heard her in the bedroom — the particular sounds of someone waking up and taking stock of where they were and what had happened the night before. A pause. Then the creak of the floor.
She appeared in the doorway. Wool sweater. Hair loose. Looking at me with the direct assessment that I was going to spend the rest of my life either running from or standing still for, and I had not yet decided which.
"You made coffee," she said.
"Yes."
She came and poured herself a cup and sat across from me. She looked at the juniper on the table. She looked at me.
"Can I see it?" she asked.
I handed it to her.
She turned it in her hands. The I caught the morning light — the clean stroke of it, the grain running through.
"It's my initial," she said.
"Yes."
"You've been making this since the first morning."
"Since the woodpile."
She looked at it for another moment. Then she set it down on the table between us, not pushing it back to me.
"Clark." She held my gaze. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer it honestly, not operationally."
"Go ahead."
"Last night — what did that mean to you?"
I looked at her. The fire was loud in the woodstove. Outside the storm had thinned overnight and the morning light was coming through the windows in the particular way of mountain mornings after weather: clean, new, without any residue.
"More than it should," I said. "Given the circumstances."
"The circumstances being that you're being paid to protect me."
"Yes."
"And what happens after this is over?"
I was quiet for a moment. I looked at the juniper disc on the table between us.
"I don't know," I said. "That's an honest answer."
"I know." She wrapped her hands around her mug. "I'm not asking you to promise anything. I'm asking what's real."
"You're real," I said. "This —" I stopped.
Started again. "I've done this work for seven years.
I've been in tight spaces with people who were scared, and I've done my job, and I've put them back into their lives and driven away, and that was the correct and appropriate ending.
" I looked at her. "Something is different about this. "
"Something," she said.
"You," I said. "You're different."
She held my gaze for a long time. Then she stood and came around the table, and I pushed my chair back, and she sat on the edge of the table in front of me, which was not what I expected, and looked down at me.
"I built something for three years," she said.
"Before the trial. I thought I was building a case.
What I was actually building was the armor you put on when you don't trust anything to be steady.
" She touched the juniper disc, lightly.
"I walked out of that building, and I looked at you, and I thought: this person doesn't need me to explain myself.
" She met my eyes. "Do you know how rare that is? "
"I'm starting to."
She looked at me for a moment longer. Then she leaned down and kissed me — different from last night, slower, the kind of kiss that was a beginning rather than a breaking point.
I pulled her off the table, and she came willingly, and we went back to the bedroom as the morning light opened across the ridge.