6. Chapter 6
Cole
Iphotograph the print from three angles before the dew can soften the edges.
Deep heel. Wide sole. Someone standing still, not passing through. Someone who stopped to look.
I know the tread before my brain catches up to admitting it.
Vibram. Wide outsole. The wear pattern of a man I have stood across from in three negotiations and one parking garage.
Mercer.
For a second, I can't hear anything but my own pulse.
Mercer doesn't freelance for principle. Mercer works for whoever is writing the check. And there is exactly one person on the current list of people writing checks for surveillance on my son.
She didn't send a letter. She didn't call. She sent a man to stand under an eight-year-old's window in the dark.
I crouch one more time and look at the heel mark. The depth of it. The patience in it.
He stood here long enough to lean in.
I send the photos to Dev at 5:47 a.m. and call him before he can pretend he was already awake.
He picks up on the second ring. "Saw them."
"Talk."
"Professional. Patient. Whoever this is, he's a watcher, not a kicker. He waits."
A watcher. Great.
"Full sweep. East treeline, access road. Cross-reference every vehicle on the ridge road from the last seventy-two hours."
"Already pulling it."
"Dev. It's Mercer."
A pause. Then, quieter: "You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Cole. That means..."
"I know what it means."
"Want me to pull whoever you need off the Bishop account? Get a full perimeter package installed today?"
"By end of business. Cameras, motion, infrared at the tree line. I want the system live before he goes to bed tonight."
"That's a six-figure rush. Probably closer to two hundred with the install window."
"Spend it. I don't care what it runs."
"Done. I'll have a team there by seven."
"One more thing. If anything pings on plates or shell LLCs, I want it before local law gets a whisper."
"Understood."
I hang up and stare at the tree line in the gray light.
Through the window I can see her at the woodpile, hauling the split logs Dev stacked yesterday into the carrier by the back door. The fireplace in the den: she'd mentioned wanting to lay a fire for Owen after dinner one of these days, and now she's loading the carrier herself instead of asking.
She's in a canvas jacket too thin for the cold, sleeves shoved up, and she's losing the fight against logs too heavy for the carrier she chose.
I go out before I decide to.
"You'll throw your back out."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're stubborn." I take the carrier from her hands. She doesn't let go right away, so for a second, we're both holding it, her hands under mine.
"I had it."
"I know you had it."
Neither of us moves.
Her hair has come loose at the temple. There's a streak of bark dust along her jaw. I should let go of the carrier. I don't.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"If you're going to take it, take it. Don't just stand there holding it with me."
I set the carrier down. My hand finds her face instead, my thumb dragging the bark dust off her cheekbone, slow, and her breath catches loud enough that I hear it over the wind picking up in the trees.
She doesn't pull back.
I feel her weight shift toward me, a half-step she hasn't decided to take yet, the kind of motion a body makes before a person catches up to it. Her pulse is going at her throat. I can see it from here.
"You've got bark dust on your jaw too," I say. "Other side."
"Convenient."
"I don't make the rules."
"You make every rule in this house."
"Not this one."
Her mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. The kind of thing she does instead of one, when a real smile would give away more than she wants to spend.
I should stop here. I know exactly where here is.
I don't stop.
My hand moves from her jaw to the side of her neck, just resting there, and I feel her breath catch a second time, harder than the first. The cold air between us has a temperature now and it isn't cold.
"Cole."
My name, again, lower this time. Not a warning. Not quite an invitation either. Somewhere in the country between the two, where I have lived for four days straight.
I look at her mouth. I am close enough to feel the warmth coming off her. Close enough that one more inch ends the question I have been not-asking since the gate.
Her chin tips up another fraction. Small. I doubt she knows she did it.
The wind moves through the trees. Somewhere past the ridge, the day is already deciding what it wants to be.
I think about the boot print in the soft ground forty feet from here. I think about a courthouse two hours south and a folder with my name in it, and a sister who would call this exact moment, this exact inch, everything she needs.
I take my hand back.
I do it slow, because doing it fast would tell her how much it costs.
There was a man under my son's window last night.
There is a custody petition sitting in a courthouse two hours south, and a sister looking for any reason to call this house unstable.
A man who can't keep his hands off the help is exactly the reason she's hunting for.
The timing of it being now, in this gray light, with her face tipped up, is the cruelest joke the morning has on offer.
"We should get the wood in," I say.
Something crosses her face. She covers it before I can name it. "Right."
The back door bangs.
Owen's at the kitchen table when I come in, a math worksheet half-finished in front of him, pencil abandoned, which means the morning's lessons lost to whatever he's about to ask for. He's already up and moving before I've set the carrier down.
"Dad!"
Boots over his pajama pants, jacket half-zipped, which means he has a plan.
"The creek's up," he says. "From the rain. Mara said when the creek's up the frogs come to the shallow part. Can we go look? Just for a little."
"Mara said." Cole hears himself say it. The flat copy.
"She said maybe." Owen looks between us. "If you said it was okay."
I think about the print in the soft ground under his window. The one he slept ten feet above and never knew about.
"No," I say.
Owen's face doesn't fall all at once. It's worse than that. It goes still first, working out whether I mean it, and then it falls.
"Just to the creek. It's not even far—"
"It's past the fence." I keep my voice level. "We're not going past the fence today."
"But Mara said maybe—"
"I said no, Owen."
He looks at me. He's eight and he doesn't have the words for the thing he's reading on my face, but he reads it anyway, the way he reads weather. He picks up the empty bucket he brought for frogs. Sets it down by the door. Careful. Like it matters where it goes.
"Okay," he says.
It is not okay. I know the difference in his okays the way I know the tread of a boot. This is the one that means he's deciding not to push, not the one that means he's fine.
He goes back inside.
Mara waits until the door clicks.
"He's been talking about that creek for three days."
"I know."
"You could have given him a reason."
"The reason is there's a man standing under his window at three in the morning. That's the reason."
"He doesn't know that. He just knows you said no and didn't tell him why.
" She steps in. Not backing down. "You do that to him.
You did it to me with the gate code, you did it last night with the call from Dev you took in the hall, and now you're doing it to an eight-year-old who wanted to look at frogs. "
"I'm keeping him inside a fence line where I can see him."
"You're keeping everyone in the dark and calling it a fence line."
That lands. I don't let her see it land.
"He's safe," I say. "Disappointed and safe. I'll take that trade every day of the week."
"I know you will." She picks up the wood carrier herself, the heavy one, and doesn't let me take it back. "That's what worries me."
She carries it inside. The set of her shoulders tells me the conversation isn't over. It's just paused until I've earned the rest of it.
I stand in the yard a second longer.
There's a thing I could have done. I could have crouched down to Owen's height the way I do, told him a version of the truth, given him the why. I didn't, because the why is a man named Mercer, and I am not putting that name in my son's head before I have to.
I told myself that was protection.
From the kitchen window, Mara isn't looking at me. She's at the table with Owen and whatever she's saying has him almost-smiling, the corner of it, the rescue she's running on the thing I just broke.
She looks at my son like he's worth the trouble of fixing.
I look at my hands.
I wanted to kiss her thirty seconds ago. Now she's in there repairing the damage I did and I'm out here in the cold, and the distance between those two things is the whole problem with me.
I should go in. There's wood to bring up and a perimeter to walk and a hundred things on a list that doesn't include standing in the cold looking at a kitchen window.
I don't go in.
I stand there and let myself have it for a second.
The thing I've been filing under irrelevant since a gate in the rain four days ago.
The want doesn't have a shape yet. That's what makes it worse.
It isn't her mouth, or it isn't only that.
It's the way she tipped her chin up at me instead of down.
The way she didn't let go of the carrier.
The way she's in my kitchen right now turning a disappointed kid back into a happy one without being asked, like it costs her nothing, like she has it to spare.
I don't know what it would be to close that inch. I keep getting to the edge of finding out and stopping.
A man who can't keep his hands off the help. That's the sentence I keep using on myself, because it's clean and it's ugly and it ends the conversation.
It isn't the true one.
The true one is that I have not wanted anything for myself in three years, and four days ago a woman drove her car into my gate, and I have wanted something every hour since, and I don't have the first idea what to do with a want I'm not allowed to have.
Same column. Same drawer. It doesn't file.
I pick up the wood carrier she left me and I go inside, where she is, because there is nowhere in this house that isn't.