Sophia
Sycamore Row was at its quietest when I turned in — the hour before the alarms, before the cicadas wound up, the light not yet committed to morning.
I'd driven the thirty minutes behind my own headlights with Liam's high beams in the mirror, close enough to comfort and far enough back to be obeying me, and then my street crested and there it all was.
My cottage. And Doris in the drive, nose to the garage, the windscreen gone to a grey film of dew.
In town, twenty minutes off in the wrong direction, I hadn't been able to make myself so much as look this way.
His garage door was down. For one second the whole of it rose up — the shattered, idiot ache of what he'd done to us — and I put it down flat.
Nope. We were not doing that. Not at six in the morning, not in this driveway, not ever if I had any say in it.
Liam's door shut soft behind me, his boots coming up the gravel slow, the gait of a man who'd decided not to crowd.
"I'm doing a walk-round," he said to the back of my head. "Inside and out. Then I'm gone."
"You're going to check my closets," I got down out of the truck; the cold came up through my boots and woke my legs to the hip, "for the bogeyman?"
"For anything." He didn't smile, and that landed harder than the words. I quit clowning and let him work.
He did the outside — the back gate, the windows, the strip of yard between me and Willow's fence where a man could stand. Then the inside, every door, behind the shower curtain, and came back with the all-clear plain in his shoulders.
"You're clear," he said. And then, because he couldn't help himself: "Murph's got the front.
" Across the road Murph's porch light was on, and the curtain behind it shifted a half-inch and settled.
"Willow's running — her words, not mine — 'intelligence work.
'" He almost smiled. "Sheriff's running drive-bys all hours.
Caleb's got eyes on the row from his side—"
"No." It came out faster than I meant it. "Not Caleb."
"Soph—"
"I mean it. I don't want him anywhere near this."
"He's already on it." He said it evenly, like a man reporting weather he couldn't change. "Was, before you got home."
"Then un-volunteer him." My voice climbed. "Un-volunteer all of you. Thursday I'm going back to work and buying my own milk and sleeping in my own bed, and I am not doing one minute of it inside a cordon the four of you threw up around me without once asking if I wanted it."
"That part — nobody asking — I'll own." He didn't rise to it, which was worse; he just stood there, immovable.
"The man we're looking for isn't a bad mood that blows over, Soph.
He's patient and he's got a reason, and until he's in a cell there's no version of your normal that hasn't got us standing in it. I'm sorry. There just isn't."
I hated him — for being right, and for the way being right left me nowhere to stand. "Until you pick him up," I said. "Then every last one of you gets off my street and I get my life back."
He pulled me in hard, hat brim knocking my temple, and held on too long. "Be vigilant, sis." His voice had gone somewhere I didn't get from Liam often. "Please."
"Okay, okay." I shoved him off by the chest before we both went under. "Pull yourself together and go catch the man so we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming."
He stepped back and really looked at me, head tipped, like he was reading a stranger's face and finding mine underneath. The kid sister he'd once hauled out of a house had grown up on him, and he'd only just caught her at it.
"You're a force of nature, Soph," he said. "Eyes up."
Then he was back in his truck and gone, and it was just me and the cottage and Doris and the dark house across the road, like before any of it.
I picked up the grocery bag and went in alone.
On Thursday I called to grovel for a shift and got Marisa, who wouldn't let me — "you're on today, honey, great to have you back" — and hung up before I could turn it into a conversation. Six years I'd lasted under her; that was why.
I drove Doris in, third water pump and all, the county hospital coming up grey and ordinary at the end of Main, and walked onto the floor as a woman with a job to do, and the relief of it nearly took my knees out.
Marisa ran me head to foot — head tipped, eyes like a falcon doing arithmetic — and didn't pretend she hadn't heard.
"The Rangers had a word with admin," she said, low. "We're briefed. Anybody comes through those doors asking after you doesn't get past this desk."
I rolled my eyes. "Wonderful. The whole county's babysitting me now."
"Hey. You're the best we've got, girly, and we take care of our own. Now get your skinny ass to work — bay four, button battery, mother coming apart. Go."
And I went, and that was the gift of it.
A line in, a sprint to radiology, and the mother coming back into her own face.
No room in it for a man with a plan of vengeance and none for the other one across the road, who'd have had me under the covers if I gave him an inch of quiet.
Anger and a full board beat that hollow place every time.
By the end of the shift Marisa dropped a fresh chart in my palm without looking up. "Still the fastest hands in this building," she said. "The rest of us be damned."
"Flattery'll get you a coffee." I took the chart and kept moving.
The next morning, I was up before the light, the way my body had run its whole life — still expecting a horse and a manure fork instead of a kitchen that was only mine.
A few days at Aunt Lou's and a couple at my own ranch hadn't reset it, and neither had coming home.
Six in the morning, and my body wanted what it had wanted every dawn since the Silver Spur, and had no shame about it: the heat of him down my back, the heavy arm that came over me in the night and pinned me without asking, the way I fit against all that size like something finally set where it belonged.
My traitor body remembered being small against him and safe in a way I'd spent thirty years insisting I didn't need.
It got cold sheets instead, and me furious — at him, at the empty half of the mattress, and most of all at the part of me still reaching for the shape he'd left in it.
Still angry, a week and more on, and glad of it: anger sat up bright and fed itself each morning, and I'd take it over lying still long enough to feel what ran underneath.
So I did the one thing that had set me right every morning for eight years before a man across the road complicated the view: made my bad coffee and carried it out to the porch to drink in the first of the sun.
My routine. My porch. My own chipped mug.
I shouldered the screen door open and stepped into the cold in my socks—
And there was a cup on my top step.
Not mine. Dottie's — waxy white lid, brown band, dead center on the tread where a person couldn't miss it, still steaming.
I picked it up before I'd decided to, and didn't have to lift the lid to know.
Flat white. Extra hot. The caramel shot Dottie slid in without ever making me say it out loud.
Two people in this county knew that order, and one of them was a four-foot-eleven woman who'd have signed her work.
The other one hadn't signed a thing. He didn't need to.
I looked across the road, anger arriving a half-second ahead of everything else, the way I'd been letting it — because angry was a place I could stand and sad was a hole I'd fall in.
And there he was.
Garage door up, the early light finding the gravel, Caleb at his bench over something stripped down, a cup at his elbow. Same waxy lid. He'd driven to Dottie's in the dark and bought two. And as I stood holding the evidence he looked up, and lifted his cup an inch and tipped it at me.
A toast. The man was toasting me.
The nerve of it went through me like a current. How dare he. How dare he buy my coffee and get it perfect and raise a cup to me like we were two neighbors sharing a fine morning, instead of what we were — a woman, and the man who'd helped decide her life behind her back.
So I made a production of it. I peeled the lid off slow, held the cup out at arm's length over the rail like a woman disposing of something hazardous, and tipped the best coffee in the county in a long brown ribbon into the magnolia bed.
It hurt. I watched the actual nectar of the actual gods sink into the dirt around my half-dead magnolia, and a small grieving sound tried to climb out of me, and I did not permit it.
A woman can have standards, or she can have good coffee.
This morning, I was having standards, where he could see.
Then I looked at him. He was smirking — one corner of his mouth up, head shaking slow, the picture of a man enjoying exactly the show he'd paid for.
Bastard. I picked up my own mug — grey, joyless, instant — sipped slow, closed my eyes, and tipped my face into the new sun like it was the finest thing ever to cross a tongue. Held it. Let him watch.
"Thanks but no thanks, asshole."
I put my back against the door, latch still in my hand, when it caught up with me.
Who even am I? I was not a woman who swore at sunrises or poured good coffee in the dirt for an audience.
I was the one who apologized when people trod on my foot, who couldn't sleep if somebody was cross with me.
And here I was, staging one-act revenge plays before the sun was up.
I drank my dreadful coffee and felt, for a good four seconds, magnificent anyway.
The cup came again the next morning, and this time it was only annoying — the gall of the routine of it, like he'd penciled me in between the bank and the hardware store. I poured it out with less ceremony and a good deal more muttering, and was short with everyone till lunch.