Chapter 6 #2
It hurts worse than anything Cruz or Robbie or my father has managed all week, and it doesn’t even have the decency to look like an injury.
A bullet I could work with. A bullet has an exit wound and a story you can tell people.
This just sits in me, permanent, quiet, the one wound in my life I never got to close because closing it would’ve meant admitting I let her go.
“I didn’t apply for a mule.”
“Nobody applies for Felony. He just shows up and refuses to leave, like a subpoena with hooves.” She sets the box down on the step, catching her breath, and doesn’t ask for help, which I respect and hate in roughly equal measure. “Congratulations. You’re adopted.”
“I already have a dog problem.” Cricket, compact and thoroughly unbothered by her own size, has appointed herself supervisor of the whole move-in and already bitten one mover for getting too close to the porch steps.
“Cricket isn’t a problem. Cricket has excellent judgment.”
“Cricket growled at me for an hour straight this morning.”
“Like I said.”
I close the distance to take the box from her hands whether she wants help or not, and for one second before she lets go, both of us are holding the same weight, close enough that I catch dust and sunscreen and, underneath both, the warm note that’s just her, and she doesn’t step back either.
“You could just say thank you,” I say.
“I could. I won’t. It ruins the effect.”
“What effect?”
“The one where you keep thinking you have to earn it.”
She lets go of the box first. I let her have that.
“For the record,” she says over her shoulder, already heading back to the trailer for another load, “the county clerk’s a day late. Holt isn’t.”
I find her an hour later, on the back porch, knees pulled up, watching Cricket chase something imaginary through the grass.
The afternoon’s finally cooling down, shadows stretching across the meadow toward the line of blue spruce and aspens.
A trail follows the creek up into the drainage behind the house, steep enough in places to earn something, and I start up it, planning on an hour run to clear my head.
I don’t decide to take my shirt off before I go. I just do it. My body doesn’t care what audience it has, and neither do I. Usually.
Sage is still there when I return and I catch her watching me on the way back.
She doesn’t look away fast enough to pretend otherwise. Neither of us moves, sweat cooling on my skin, her eyes tracking down before she catches herself and drags them back up to my face like she’s been caught reading something she wasn’t supposed to see.
I don’t smile. I don’t reach for a joke to defuse it, no tack room move this time the night of Maren’s wedding. That was still safe enough to joke about. This isn’t.
I just look back. Level. Unbothered. The same way I’ve looked at her since that night, except there’s no lantern light to blame this time, no champagne excuse, just the two of us and the quiet that comes right before someone crosses a room they shouldn’t.
Her breath changes. I watch it happen, the shift from steady to shallow, and the want in me pulls tight and stays there, coiled, patient, entirely unconcerned with the fact that I promised her restraint in the kitchen two days ago.
“You’re doing it on purpose,” she says, quiet.
“Doing what?”
“Standing there like that.”
“I just finished a run, Sage. This is what finishing a run looks like.”
“Liar.”
She doesn’t move. Neither do I. The porch is maybe eight feet across and it feels like the tack room again, like the truck cab, like every room this house has apparently decided to hand us.
Cricket gets there first.
She trots up the steps and plants herself directly between us, staring up at me with the flat, unblinking judgment of a dog who’s appointed herself the last line of defense.
Sage snorts, short and surprised, and the moment loosens into laughter. I can’t tell which one of us is more grateful to the dog for doing it.
“Good girl,” Sage says, scratching Cricket’s ears, not looking at me.
“Traitor,” I say, to the dog.
Sage’s mouth twitches like she’s fighting a real smile and losing.
“You should go shower,” she says. “You smell like a man who just ran a mountain.”
“I did run a mountain.”
“I noticed.”
She says it too fast, like she meant to keep it to herself and didn’t quite manage it, and this time I’m not the one who has to walk away first.
I go inside before either of us finds out what happens if nothing interrupts us next time.
Her boxes end up in the master, the one with the attached bath and the west-facing windows that catch the mountains at sunset.
I carried them there myself before she had a chance to argue, because it was never actually a question.
Mine go in the room across the hall, the one that shares the hall bath with the third bedroom.
I notice what’s in her boxes, and she probably noticed what’s in mine: a laptop with a lock screen I don’t recognize, a hard-sided file case with a combination latch, a phone I’ve never seen her use.
She notices mine too. I watch her take in the same setup that I’ve established in the office downstairs: the case, the second phone, the careful architecture of a man running his own operation out of a house he’s supposed to be sharing with his wife.
Neither of us says a word about it. That, more than the porch, more than the mule, is the closest thing to a vow either of us has made since the contract.
The house has two intelligence operations and a red heeler who’s already decided she’s Sage’s own personal security detail.
By the time the last box is unpacked I’ve counted exactly four people in this valley I trust completely, and I’ve spent the whole day watching a fifth one walk my fence line like he’s got nothing to hide.
Holt finds me on the porch after the house finally empties out, headlights disappearing down the drive one truck at a time, and hands me his phone without a word.
The photo is Sage, walking up to the boundary house this morning, box in her arms, taken from a distance long enough that whoever shot it had to know precisely what lens to use and precisely where to stand to get it clean.
“Taken from our side,” Holt says. “Blackwater land. Whoever took it had a clear line all the way from the ridge.”
I pull up the photo from the anonymous number the night of Knox’s wedding, timestamped hours before either father had said a word about this house, the boundary house catching the last of the light the same way it’s catching it in Holt’s photo now.
Same slant. Same hour of the afternoon, different day. Like whoever’s watching this house has a schedule and a favorite window, and no interest in hiding either one.
Someone knew about this house, and about her, long before either family pronounced our living quarters here.
I walk to the front window, still holding both photos side by side, and look out toward the ridge where the shot must have been taken from. Half expecting nothing. Half expecting what I find.
Felony is standing at the tree line, motionless, in the precise spot the angle says the photographer had to be standing.
He’s looking straight back at the house.
Straight at me.