Chapter 9
CLARK
I handled it wrong.
Jax's twenty-hundred check-in brought new information: the proxy was active again, still no physical movement, Renata had engaged a forensic firm to identify the source.
I had a twenty-minute conversation with Jax that went into operational detail that I specifically did not share with Isla when I came back inside.
She was at the table. She looked up when I came back from the porch.
"What did he say?"
"Nothing new," I said. "Still watching."
It was true. It was also incomplete in the way that things can be true and wrong at the same time.
What Jax had told me was that the proxy had been used a total of nine times in twenty-four hours, which meant systematic, which meant the opposition counsel was treating this as a real line of inquiry rather than a long shot.
It was still far from us. It was still manageable. But it was real.
I told her nothing new because the real version would frighten her, and she was already doing well, and I calculated — wrongly — that protecting her from the information was the same as protecting her.
She knew immediately.
"You're doing the thing," she said.
I looked at her.
"The thing where you receive information and process it and then give me the edited version.
" She folded her hands on the table. "I told you today what I've been managing for three years.
I told you about the thirty-one people who looked away.
I need you to tell me the difference between you and them. "
The sentence landed with precision.
I set the radio down. I sat across from her. I told her what Jax had actually said — the nine contacts, the pattern it implied, the current assessment, the actual distance between that pattern and our location.
She listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"You were protecting me," she said.
"Yes."
"That's not your job."
"It is, actually."
"Protecting my physical safety is your job." She met my eyes. "Deciding what information I can handle is not. I've been making those calls for three years. I'm good at them." She paused. "And I'd like to be trusted with them."
I looked at her.
"You're right," I said.
She waited.
"I made the wrong call," I said. "Not because I think you can't handle it. Because I didn't want you to have to." I held her gaze. "Those aren't the same thing."
"No," she said. "They're not." Something in her expression shifted. "Thank you for saying that."
"I should have said the right thing first."
"Most people don't. They say the useful thing that protects their position and call it consideration." She looked at me steadily. "You said the true thing, which is the harder option."
"I'm learning," I said.
She looked at me for a moment. Something complicated moved through her expression.
"Isla—"
"No, I know." She shook her head. "I'm not — I'm not going to pretend that the last two days haven't been—" She stopped. Started again. "The last two days have mattered. Whatever happens after I walk out of here, they'll have mattered. I need you to know that."
"They matter to me too," I said. "That's not a performance. It's the thing I'm least able to manage in this situation."
She looked at me.
"Stay," I said. The word came out without my permission, which told me it was true.
"After the trial. Come back to Bitterroot Ridge.
Or—" I stopped. "Or I'll come to you. I don't care about the geography.
I care about the—" I stopped again, because I was not a man who was fluent in this particular language, and I was running up against its edges.
"The what?" she said quietly.
"The thing that's happened here." I looked at her. "I carve things that I mean to keep. I don't make them for people I'm not planning to see again."
She looked at the juniper disc on the table.
"Show me when it's finished," she said.
"It's finished tonight," I said.
She stood and came around the table and I stood too and she put her hands on my chest and looked up at me.
"Clark Baxter," she said, "you are the most plainspoken man I have ever met."
"I know."
"I mean it as a compliment."
"I know that too."
She kissed me.
The fire was behind us and the morning light was coming through the east window and she was already here, already close, and the first time had been about breaking through something and this was about what came after the breaking — slower, quieter, the particular intimacy of two people who had already seen each other clearly and were choosing to look again.
I took my time with her there, in the grey light, on the narrow bed we'd been sharing like it was the most natural thing in the world, because by then it was.
She made a sound when I worked my way down her throat, her collarbone, the soft curve of her shoulder, and I catalogued it with the same attention I brought to everything that mattered.
I wanted to know her — not just the heat of her, though that was considerable, but the specific geography of what made her breathe unevenly, what made her hands tighten in my hair, what made her say my name in the dark with the particular quality that meant she'd stopped managing anything.
"Clark." Breathless. Present.
"I've got you," I said against her skin.
I meant it in every direction.
She was warm and responsive and completely honest in the way that people were honest when they were no longer performing anything, and when she finally pulled me up to meet her eyes in the grey morning light, she looked at me like I was something she hadn't expected to find and was not going to apologize for finding.
"Stay," she said, soft, echoing the word I hadn't planned to say.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said.
I held her gaze and moved against her and watched her come apart slowly, thoroughly, with the unhurried trust of a woman who had decided I was worth the risk, and I thought: yes. This. Keep this.
Afterward she was quiet against my shoulder, her breathing even, her hand flat on my chest.
"You're different in the morning," she said.
"How?"
"Less guarded." She turned her head to look at me. "Like the operational part hasn't fully come back online yet."
"Is that good or bad?"
"It's the best version I've seen of you." She paused. "They're all good versions. But this one—" She touched my jaw. "This one I'd like to keep seeing."
I held her in the morning light and thought about what I was going to do with that, and what I was going to do with the word stay, and whether the correct response to something you hadn't expected was to hold it carefully or to simply open your hands and let it be there.
I let it be there.