Chapter 32
I didn’t sleep much after Caleb left, which told me something all by itself, because I usually sleep like a woman with no unresolved feelings whatsoever.
I lay in bed running the whole scene back, the rope, his wrists going still instead of fighting, how his voice had cracked open around my name like it cost him something to let it happen.
Then the flat, fast no. Then how he hadn’t even tried to explain it, just sat there with his mouth open and nothing behind it.
I texted him at seven, before I’d had coffee, because if I waited for caffeine I’d have time to sand the message down into something easier to ignore.
Come by before work. We need to finish last night’s conversation, not the fun part, the other part.
He showed up at seven forty, showered, dressed for the office, tie already knotted, which meant he really was heading in after this and hadn’t just armored himself for me.
Both things could be true at once. I poured him coffee anyway because I wasn’t trying to punish him, I was trying to see him, and those are different projects.
“I want to say the good part first,” I said, sitting across from him at my own small table, “because I don’t want you walking out of here thinking last night was a mistake. It wasn’t. You gave me something real. I felt it. I don’t think you can fake going that quiet.”
“I wasn’t faking.”
“I know. That’s exactly my point.” I turned my mug slowly between my hands, watching him instead of the coffee.
“You let me tie your hands to a bed frame in a plywood train car, Caleb. You didn’t flinch, you didn’t clock the exits after the first ten seconds, you just let me run the whole night.
And then I asked for a house key and you said no before I’d even finished the sentence in my own head. ”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“Explain to me how it’s not the same thing. Genuinely. I want to understand the math, because from where I’m sitting, physical trust and household trust come out of the same account, and you just told me one of them is overdrawn.”
He turned his own mug in a slow half circle, a habit I recognized because I did it too when I was buying myself three seconds to build a sentence that wouldn’t fall apart in front of another person.
“The office has client files. Confidential material, insurance cases, addresses, medical documentation on people who never agreed to have their information anywhere near a girlfriend. It’s licensing law. ”
“I never asked for the office.” I kept my voice even, which took more effort than it should have.
“I asked for your living room. I asked to see the couch and the kitchen and whatever ordinary human clutter you’ve got in a junk drawer somewhere.
I have never once asked you to open a locked file cabinet full of somebody else’s medical records.
You built that argument because it’s easier to defend than the real one. ”
He didn’t answer that, and the silence sat there long enough that I let it, because I’ve learned that with Caleb the truth eventually surfaces if you just stop filling the air for him.
His hand moved on the table, not toward mine, just a small restless shift, fingers spreading flat against the wood like he was checking it was still solid.
He glanced once toward the door, the old habit, the exit check, and then made himself look back at me instead, which was its own small violence against the part of him that wanted out of the room.
“I don’t know how to let someone stand in that house,” he said finally, quiet, like it cost him to admit even that much. “It’s not about the files.”
“I know it’s not about the files. I think you know it too.
I just wanted to hear you say it instead of me saying it for you.
” I reached across and put my hand over his.
He didn’t pull away, but I felt the tendon under my palm go tight for a second before it let go, the way a held breath finally leaves a body.
“I’m not asking you to fix it in my kitchen at seven forty in the morning.
I’m asking you to notice that you’ve got a door in your head that opens for rope and rigging and my hands wherever I want to put them, and slams shut the second I ask to see where you keep your coffee mugs.
That’s backward, and I think you know it’s backward, or you wouldn’t have looked like that when I asked. ”
He looked down at our hands, then at the clock. I let him have the exit rather than watch him build another defense.
“I have to get to the office.” He stood, hesitated, then kissed the top of my head and left.
After he left I spent an hour at my kitchen table with the same legal pad Dani had started me on weeks ago, adding to the file as I’d told her I would, nothing but what anyone could find with a library card and a little patience.
County business filing, current license number, the Mason Ridge address I already had memorized down to the porch light.
I found a five-year-old newspaper mention of Rourke Investigations helping locate a missing teenager, a small item buried in a community roundup.
I stopped there on purpose. Caleb had a life outside that office, people who belonged to him as surely as Dani belonged to me, and I’d decided before I ever opened the search bar that none of them were going in this file.
Whatever I built, I was building around him, not around everyone who’d ever loved him.
I sat back and looked at that decision for a second, proud of it in a way that surprised me.
Caleb had my whole life memorized down to my sandwich order and my childhood address, gathered without asking.
I could have kept pulling threads all morning.
Instead I closed the laptop with the boundary still intact, and that felt like the difference Dani kept trying to get me to see.
Fair wasn’t the same as right. I could match him fact for fact and still choose where the matching stopped.
I told Dani that afternoon while she relabeled prop bins beside me. She listened without interrupting or pretending the inventory needed all her attention.
“So he’ll hand you his body and slam the door on the rest of his life,” she said when I finished. “That’s a hell of an inventory.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Loving a complicated man does not mean shrinking your ask until it fits whatever he says he can survive,” she said. “Make him answer the actual question.”
I had no joke for that. Dani bumped her shoulder against mine once and went back to the labels. By morning, the thought had settled into a decision.
I was going to follow him. Once. Not to catch him doing anything, not to build a case against him as he’d once built one against me, but because I wanted to understand the shape of the life he wouldn’t hand me on purpose, and I couldn’t do that from my kitchen table with a legal pad and good intentions.
I’d tell Dani where I was going and when I expected to be done, as she’d have told me if our positions were reversed.
I wasn’t going near the office, wasn’t going to knock on the Mason Ridge door, wasn’t going to do anything he could call an ambush later.
Just watch, from a public street, in daylight, after he’d watched me for weeks before I ever knew his name.
He had spent a long time learning the shape of my whole life from a parked van.
I thought it was well past time I understood a little more of his from the other side of the glass, and I wanted to be honest with myself about why.
Not to punish him. To finally see the man I kept being asked to trust with my hands still tied.