She’s With Me
SHE’S WITH ME
PATRICK
Morgan sat up a little straighter. “What does it say?”
“Standard tox panels didn’t reveal anything, but he wants to run some additional tests. He says to give him a day or two.”
She exhaled, clearly disappointed. “A day or two is more than reasonable. Some specialized tests take weeks to come back, especially if you have to send them out.”
“He won’t be sending them out,” Patrick told her. “He likes to handle things personally.”
He saw her processing that, much the same way she’d processed his father’s setup. To her credit, she didn’t ask the questions he knew were rattling around in her head. She drained the last of her coffee and started cleaning up.
He wasn’t ready to say goodbye. The urge to keep her close, keep her near, was strong.
“Do you have any plans?” he asked.
“Not really. Why?”
“I have a job this morning,” he said. “An estate clear out over on Deep Creek Road. My crew's already out there but I like to check in.” He paused. “Why don’t you come with me?”
She looked at him with more curiosity than reproach.
“It's not glamorous,” he clarified. “It's moving furniture and packing boxes and inventory, but maybe it’ll clear your head.”
She was quiet for a moment, considering it. Then, “Why not?”
The house on Deep Creek Road was a 1940s colonial on a good piece of land.
It had been owned by the same family for three generations, which meant it had accumulated three generations’ worth of stuff.
The current owner now lived in Florida and had hired Patrick to handle the contents before the sale.
His team had been at it since seven-thirty.
He pulled into the drive behind the moving truck and two of his guys' vehicles. Morgan got out and stood for a moment, taking it all in—front door propped open, a line of boxes on the porch, two guys visible through the bay window moving something large.
“How long does something like this take?” she asked.
“It varies. We usually come out and do a walkthrough before we quote and schedule. We're on day two here. Probably one more after this.”
The sound of something scraping across a hardwood floor came from inside, followed by a brief exchange of voices. Patrick took the porch steps and went in.
His regular crew ran to six guys. He'd built it up from two, back when he and a friend with a pickup truck had started doing weekend moves for extra cash.
Now they had two trucks, a trailer, and more bookings than he could take without turning people away.
He wasn't in it every day anymore, but he showed up more days than not. It was still his business.
Dalton and Cody—two of his newer hires—were in the living room working on getting a sectional couch around a tight corner. They both looked up when Patrick came in.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Patrick said. “How's it going?”
“Living room's almost done. Kitchen's maybe an hour.” Dalton glanced past him at Morgan, who'd come in behind him and was standing in the entry.
“She’s with me,” Patrick said, stepping forward. Was it a territorial move? Absolutely. Did he care? Not at all.
Morgan didn’t seem to notice. She was looking past Dalton at the dimensions of the hallway and the angle problem the couch presented.
“If you take the legs off the left arm section,” she said, “it’ll clear the corner.”
Dalton looked at her, doubt in his eyes.
“It's three bolts,” she said. “You can see the bracket from here.”
A beat. Cody crouched down and looked. “Huh.”
Twenty minutes later the sectional was on the truck and Morgan was in the kitchen, hands in pockets.
“So where do you want me?” she asked, looking up.
He blinked, inappropriate images coming to mind unbidden. The variety of clear surfaces around them didn’t help. “I’m sorry. What?”
“If I'm going to be here, I might as well be useful.”
“You’re sure?” he asked. “I didn’t ask you out here to work.”
“I know. I don’t mind. I like having something to do.”
He was the same way. He sent her to the spare bedroom with a roll of tape and a marker, where she spent the next hour methodically going through the closet contents, labeling, and staging everything for his guys to carry down.
He checked on her twice. Both times she was deep in it, efficient and unhurried, fully focused on the task.
He stood in the doorway the second time and watched her for longer than was warranted.
She looked up.
“You good?” he asked, like that was why he'd appeared.
“Yep. Almost done in here. Do you want me to start on the linen closet in the hall next?”
“Sure,” he said, and went back downstairs.
They broke at noon for lunch, which consisted of eating hoagies from the local Wawa under a sprawling sugar maple.
His guys had accepted Morgan's presence without issue. Patrick’s not-so-subtle caveman routine probably had something to do with that, along with the fact that she saved them a lot of work.
Cody even suggested that Morgan join them on jobs from then on.
Patrick handed her an iced tea and watched her assess the property with a thoughtful, contemplative expression on her face.
“What were you thinking about just now?” he asked.
She looked at him, mildly surprised. “The family who lived here.” She turned back to the house. “You can tell a lot about people by how they live.”
He thought about the kinds of scenes she must be used to dealing with. Of using evidence to reconstruct the happening around someone’s death.
“What does this place tell you?”
“That these people took pride in their home. They cared.”
He looked at the house. He knew what she meant. It wasn't just the structure, it was the quality of attention visible everywhere. The garden beds were neatly edged and cleaned in prep for winter. The porch boards were tight and level. It showed care that had accumulated over decades.
“What’s your place like?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“Not like this,” she said quietly, then smiled.
“I live in a studio apartment in Philly,” she said.
“But before that, we lived in Delaware County. Bigger than a row home, but smaller than this. It wasn’t bad, but our house wasn’t cozy and lived in like this one.
My mom’s big on image—or more accurately, my stepfather is big on image and my mom is big on whatever my stepfather wants. ” She shook her head. “Sorry, TMI.”
TMI? There was no such thing as too much information where Morgan was concerned. He wanted to know it all.
“I’m guessing Pine Ridge is kind of culture shock for you.”
“Yes, but in a good way. I feel like I can actually breathe here.”
“Breathing is good,” he agreed, and they ate the rest of their lunch in a comfortable, companionable silence.
By three o'clock the house was empty and his crew was tying off the truck. Patrick signed off on the paperwork, shook hands, and stood in the drive watching them pull out.
Morgan was leaning against the passenger door of his SUV with her hands in her pockets, her dark hair pulled back, a streak of dust on the sleeve of her jacket she hadn't noticed. She looked calmer than she’d been earlier that morning, like the work had burned something off.
He pulled out his keys. “Ready to head out?”
“I am.”
They drove out past the ridge instead of through town—not because it was faster, but because it wasn't. It was the long way by at least fifteen minutes, taking them through a stretch of back roads that ran along the creek and came out on the far side of Pine Ridge.
She looked out the window at the creek, running low from the recent lack of rain.
“You wouldn’t know it by looking at it now, but that creek gets up to road level with snow melt in the spring,” he said, when they passed the low bridge. “Comes up about four feet in a bad year. When I was eight, Riley dared me to wade into it.”
“Did you?”
“Of course.”
“What happened?”
“I made it about three feet in before the current took me.”
Her eyes widened. “And then what?”
“Then I was floating downstream and significantly less confident in my abilities.”
The small sound she made—not quite a laugh, but close—was the best thing he'd heard all day.
He pulled into the Victorian's drive a little after four. The house was quiet, Garrett's truck gone, no sign of Declan or Wade.
“I've got the evening shift at the pub,” he said, wishing he didn’t.
She looked at the house, then at him. As if maybe she was as reluctant to leave as he was to let her go.
“That’s okay. I should be getting back anyway.”
He walked her to her car. She unlocked it, then paused before getting in.
“Thank you,” she said. “For today. It was nice.”
He nodded. “My pleasure.”
He watched until she drove away, rubbing his chest where a sudden sense of loss had taken up residence behind his ribcage.