Chapter 3 #2
She starts rolling it out the way she does every morning, her back to me.
I'm standing at the kitchen island with the coffee in my hand and the place on my knuckle where her thumb touched me feeling like a brand.
I don't say a word.
She doesn't either.
* * *
The screen door bangs open at five forty-three.
Nash comes barreling in with Stitch tucked under his arm and his pajama bottoms on inside out, and the boy doesn't notice that the kitchen is too quiet, or that his mother isn't turning around to greet him, or that I'm standing at the island with a coffee cup I haven't lifted to my mouth.
He climbs up on the bench next to me with a big smile on his face. "Mornin', partner."
"Mornin'."
He looks at me. "You sleep okay?"
I think about it. "Slept fine, partner. How ‘bout you?"
"I had a dream about Diesel."
"What about him?"
"He could talk. He told me to share my snacks."
"Sounds about right for Diesel."
Nash giggles and drags Stitch into his lap. "Mama, can I have pancakes?"
"You want sausage too?" Her voice from across the kitchen, normal, the voice she uses with him.
"Yes, please."
I watch her work.
She's got her back to both of us. Her shoulders are tight in a way they weren't yesterday morning.
She's moving slower than she usually moves. Every motion is deliberate.
She brings Nash's plate out a few minutes later.
When she sets it down in front of him, she looks across him to me.
I don't look away. She doesn't either.
For one second, two seconds, three seconds, the woman is meeting my eyes the way she hasn't met them in two months—not from the corner of her eye, not in passing, not when she thinks I can't see her.
Direct. Bare. The way a person looks at something they have decided is worth looking at full on.
Then Nash says, "Mama, syrup."
She breaks the look and brings him the syrup.
I cut up his pancakes for him, and before I know it, it’s time for church.
Seven sharp.
Phantom at the head of the cypress table.
Banshee on his right. Thunder on his left. Spur, Blaze, and Blight ranged around.
Prospects are out of the room.
The shotgun above the bar gets a single beam of morning light across it the way it does this time of year.
I sit in my usual spot, and we all wait.
"Y'all know I called this," Phantom says. "Y'all know I don't call church this fucking early unless I have to. Rogue's gonna talk. Y'all are gonna listen."
He nods at me.
I take a breath. "Some of you know I came to this ranch with a past. Phantom knows most of it. The rest of you know there was somethin' before. We've all left it alone for a long time and I've appreciated it."
The brothers don't say anything.
"What you need to know this morning is that somebody from that past has been watchin' the property for a week.
I got a name. I got a face. I got a history with him from before.
He's a contractor for a firm that used to employ me.
The firm doesn't take it well when somebody leaves them, and they've been sittin' on me for ten years waitin' for a reason to wake up. "
Banshee shifts in his chair. "What reason?"
"Don't know yet."
"Best guess."
I set my coffee down on the cypress table. "Money. Politics. An old debt. They don't tell you why when they come for you. They just come."
Thunder leans forward, elbows on the table. "How many?"
"Two that I've clocked. There may be more."
Spur, from down the table: "Plan?"
I turn the empty mug a quarter turn. "Not gonna sit on it. I'm gonna find out who he's reportin' to, and I'm gonna give him a reason to report back that I'm not worth the cost. I'd rather do that than escalate."
Blaze runs a hand down his beard. "And if it escalates?"
I look at Phantom. Phantom holds my eye.
"Then we take it up a notch."
The room is quiet for a long second.
Phantom speaks up. "Brothers, this doesn’t leave this room. Not to ol' ladies. Not to bunk mates. Not to Hadley."
He cuts his eyes at me when he says her name.
I don't react.
"Rogue's been with us a long time. If the firm comes for him, they come for all of us. Y'all know what that means."
The brothers nod, one after another, around the table.
The only one who doesn’t is Thunder. Instead, he turns to me.
"And the woman?" he says.
The room shifts.
I look at him.
"Hadley," he says. "The boy. If they come for you, they come for them. What's the plan for them?"
It's the question I've been chewing on since the middle of the night.
I say, "I'm workin' on it."
Phantom taps his ring once against the cypress. "Work faster."
Thunder doesn't say anything. He just gives me a slow nod across the table—and I know it's not for Phantom. It's for me.
He's not gonna ask about her again. He doesn't have to.
I nod back, and Phantom slams the gavel down.
I walk out of the clubhouse out onto a Texan-sun filled day.
The yard is bright. The day is heating up the way it always does out here, fast and dry, the air smelling like cedar and dust.
Behind Hadley's cabin, the laundry line is hung with three of Nash's t-shirts, a pair of her jeans, and a pillowcase that's already drying in the sun.
Hadley’s standing at the line in a different shirt than the one she was wearing at breakfast.
Her hair is up now. She's bending to the basket at her feet and shaking out a sheet.
Nash is in the dirt yard between her cabin and mine, throwing the football to Diesel by himself because someone must've turned the dog out an hour ago.
I stand at the edge of the gravel and watch them.
I think about the half-second touch on my knuckle, about the look across the kitchen.
How her left ring finger, bare, half-hidden in the laundry basket because she has her sleeves rolled down against the sun.
Hartley somewhere in Llano County right now with a printout of my face with a partner I haven't identified yet, and a clock that started ticking the second the sedan returned the rental car last night.
I've loved this woman for two months. I’m pretty damn sure I've loved that boy for almost as long.
I've spent a decade staying invisible, and the men I ran from are about to make me visible whether I want it or not.
There's a choice coming in the next few weeks.
The choice is staying on this ranch with these two people or disappearing to keep them safe, and I haven't decided yet which one I can live with.
Diesel catches the football out of the air and Nash whoops.
Hadley looks up from the laundry line and laughs—softer than she laughed at Thunder last night, just a quiet startled laugh because her boy is happy.
She catches sight of me at the edge of the gravel and doesn't look away.
I look at her across the yard.
The white hat is shadowing my eyes.
She can't read my face, but I'm reading hers, and hers is telling me she might be ready for this.
I tip my hat at her.
She nods.
A small thing. A nothing thing. The kind of exchange a hired hand and a cook would share across a yard before noon.
I walk back to my cabin.
I close the door behind me.
I sit down at the monitors.
I'm gonna have to tell her. I just don't know when.