6. CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX
Hannah
The rain had been hammering the cabin roof since before dawn, a steady percussion that worked its way into the logs until the whole structure seemed to hum with it.
I stood under the eaves outside the back door, water streaming off my shoulders, and listened to the woods on either side of the clearing.
Nothing moved but the rain. Nothing sounded but the rain.
I’d walked the perimeter twice, checked the tree line where the gravel track disappeared into the pines, and found nothing that hadn’t been there yesterday.
The green sedan with Ohio plates was forty miles south by now, or it should have been.
I’d taken the long route. They would have taken the main road. Basic tradecraft.
I pushed through the door and closed it behind me.
The hinges didn’t whine. I’d fixed that three days ago.
My boots left wet prints on the floorboards, dark against the pale wood, and the smell hit me before I’d taken two steps inside—oatmeal, cinnamon, a sweet note underneath that I couldn’t place.
The cabin was warm. Warmer than it had any right to be with the temperature dropping outside and the rain coming down in sheets that turned the windows into running water.
The wood stove threw orange light across the main room, painting the log walls in shadows that moved when the fire popped.
A single lantern burned on the scarred table, its flame steady behind the glass.
Hannah stood at the stove. My flannel shirt hung off one shoulder, the sleeves rolled to her elbows, and she had the insulated gloves on—the ones from Pine Creek, leather-palmed, the small size that fit her hands exactly.
She was stirring oatmeal in the cast-iron skillet with a wooden spoon, her back to me, red hair piled loosely at the nape of her neck where a few strands had escaped and fallen against her collarbone.
The dish towels she’d folded over the oven handle caught the stove’s heat and released it in waves that carried the smell of clean cotton through the room.
Above the sink, the herbs she’d hung on the windowsill,rosemary, thyme, the purple oregano,dried in bunches tied with twine, their scent cutting through the oatmeal whenever she moved past them.
I crossed to the counter. The coffee pot sat where I’d left it this morning, half-full, gone cold.
I dumped it, measured fresh grounds from the tin, filled the pot from the hand pump that squealed twice before the water came.
Lit the burner with a match struck against my thumbnail.
The blue flame caught, steadied, and the pot began its slow gurgle toward coffee worth drinking.
Behind me, Hannah’s spoon kept scraping against the skillet.
A soft, rhythmic sound that had become as much a part of the cabin’s soundtrack as the fire’s crack or the roof’s creak when the wind changed direction.
I’d been listening to it for days. Had stopped noticing when I’d started noticing, which was its own kind of problem.
The coffee finished. I poured two mugs: the sturdier tin one for her, the one without cracks; mine was the plain black mug I’d been using for years, the handle worn smooth from my thumb.
I set hers on the counter near her elbow, close enough that she’d reach it without looking, and leaned against the wood with my own mug between my palms. The heat seeped through the calluses.
Through the silver rings. Through skin that had stopped registering temperature the way normal skin should a long time ago.
She was adding dried fruit to the oatmeal.
Apricots, maybe, or apples—whatever she’d found in the back of the cabinet behind the ammunition case, wrapped in wax paper so old the writing had faded to nothing.
She sliced them with my pocketknife, the blade moving through the fruit with a precision born of practice, not fear.
Twenty-six years of handling sharp things in kitchens that probably hadn’t been much better than this one.
The fruit went into the skillet in a scatter of orange and brown, and she stirred it in with two turns of the spoon before lowering the heat.
I watched her hands. The way the wooden spoon moved through the oatmeal, folding the fruit in, adjusting the consistency with little flicks of her wrist that spoke of someone who’d done this a thousand mornings in a thousand different places and didn’t need to think about the steps.
The gloves fit. No excess leather at the fingertips, no gap at the wrist where cold air could get in.
She’d broken them in already, the leather softening around her knuckles where she’d been working the pump handle.
“You can either help or sit down.” She didn’t look up from the skillet. “Hovering is making me nervous.”
I hadn’t realized I was hovering. Her warning should have been obvious, and somehow, I’d missed it.
I pushed off the counter, crossed to the table, and pulled out the chair I usually sat in—the one with the reinforced leg, the bracket I’d installed while she slept.
Turned it backward. Straddled it, my forearms resting on the chairback, the silver rings catching the lantern light in dull gleams. The wood creaked under my weight. Solid. No wobble. I’d fixed that too.
The day stretched out in front of us. Nowhere to go.
Nothing to do but exist in the same five hundred square feet of log cabin with the rain hammering the roof and the fire burning in the stove and the oatmeal sending steam toward the ceiling in thin curls that carried cinnamon and whatever fruit she’d found.
I took a drink of coffee. Black. Bitter. The way it was supposed to be.
“How do you take your coffee?” Hannah asked. She was portioning the oatmeal into two bowls now, her back still to me, the question thrown over her shoulder like she was asking about the weather.
I set my mug down. “Black. Like everything else I consume.”
Flat. Deadpan. The delivery had shut down conversations for twenty years. The words left my mouth and hung in the air between us, and I watched her shoulders go still for half a second before she turned around with a bowl in each hand and a look on her face I hadn’t prepared for.
She laughed.
Not a chuckle. Not the polite sound someone makes when they’re humoring you.
A real laugh, bright and sudden and entirely unguarded, rising from somewhere behind her ribs and not stopping until it had filled the whole cabin.
Her head tipped back. Her green eyes crinkled at the corners.
The sound of it hit the log walls and bounced back, warmer than the fire, brighter than the lantern, and for a second, I forgot why we were here.
Forgot the burner phones under the floorboard.
Forgot the green sedan and the client and the fifty thousand dollars sitting in an envelope I hadn’t delivered.
Forgot everything except the woman standing in my kitchen with two bowls of oatmeal and a laugh that had no business existing in a place like this.
My jaw loosened. I felt it happen—the tension along the scarred edge giving way, the muscle in my right cheek twitching once before I could clamp it down.
The reaction was physical, automatic, a tell I’d trained out of myself years ago because tells got men killed in my line of work.
Hannah’s laugh had bypassed twenty years of training in under three seconds.
I looked away. At the fire. At the window where rain streamed down the glass in rivulets that caught the lantern light and fractured it. At anything that wasn’t her face, because her face put a pressure in my chest I didn’t have a category for and wasn’t interested in naming.
She set a bowl in front of me. Steam rose from it, carrying cinnamon and fruit and the homely warmth of food made by hands that knew what they were doing.
Her own bowl went on the other side of the table.
She pulled out her chair,the one with the woven seat, the one I hadn’t fixed because it hadn’t needed fixing,and sat down across from me with her red hair loose around her shoulders and her gloves off now, set beside her bowl where the leather caught the light.
“Eat,” she said. “Before it gets cold.”
I picked up my spoon. The oatmeal was thick, studded with fruit that had softened in the heat until it nearly dissolved on the tongue.
Sweet without being cloying. Food that belonged in a kitchen with a name, not a safehouse with a loaded gun on the table.
I ate. She ate. The rain kept hammering.
The fire kept burning. And somewhere in the space between my second bite and my third, the cabin stopped feeling like somewhere I was keeping her and started feeling like somewhere we were both just staying, and the difference between those two things was wider than the mountain outside and twice as difficult to cross.
By early afternoon the rain hadn’t let up.
If anything, it had settled into a steadier rhythm, a gray curtain that turned the windows opaque and the cabin into a lantern lit from within.
Hannah had been pacing for twenty minutes—from the table to the sink, from the sink to the stove, opening cabinets and closing them without taking anything out, restless energy born from being shut inside with nowhere to go and too many hours ahead.
I sat at the table with the legal pad open and nothing written on it, watching her move through the cabin like she was looking for an exit that didn’t exist, and after the third circuit past the wood stove I set the pen down because whatever I’d been pretending to work on wasn’t happening.