Chapter 25
MAGS
I have known for eight days.
Not known the way you know a fact. Known the way you know a sound in the dark that you keep telling yourself is the wind.
You lie there cataloging explanations. The heat. The hours. The reconstruction eating my mornings down to coffee and crackers because who has time to eat when six weeks of stolen data needs rebuilding from satellite relays.
The bacon was greasy. The strawberry crumble was too sweet. The exhaustion is cumulative and I am a woman in a demanding field season, and this is what demanding field seasons feel like.
Eight days of telling myself it's the wind.
I drive to Livingston. Two counties over, two hours on the interstate, a town where no one knows my face or my red hair or my federal permits or the fact that I am sleeping with the man whose land I was sent here to study.
I park at a drugstore on the south end of town and sit in the lot for five minutes before I go inside. I buy the test, a bottle of water, and a bag of almonds so the test is not alone on the counter. The cashier is a teenager with earbuds in. She does not look at me.
My apartment is quiet at two in the afternoon. Flour smell rising through the floorboards. Willa's Thursday sourdough schedule humming below me like a heartbeat I didn't ask for. I set the bag on the bathroom counter, drink the water, and wait.
Three minutes is not a long time. I have waited longer for collar signals to resolve. I have waited longer for Luke McAllister to finish a sentence.
I pick up the test.
Two lines. Clear and definitive and not the wind.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub with the test in my hand and breathe.
In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way I breathe when I am documenting a kill site, and the data needs my hands steady.
My hands are steady now. The rest of me is not.
The cabin. I wore that blue dress to Duke's like a woman running an experiment, and the experiment worked exactly the way I designed it.
I have been on birth control since undergrad. I can tell you the exact failure rate of every method on the market.
None of those numbers mean anything when a man is peeling a blue dress off you at three in the morning like you are the answer to a question he stopped asking five years ago.
I carry the test to the kitchen and set it next to the field notebook and the flannel of Luke's I haven't given back.
My phone buzzes.
Luke: Baseline looks clean. Four days of coverage, no gaps. We're ready when you are.
The cameras have been live since Saturday. I have eyes on my wolves again for the first time since the receiver was stolen at the rodeo. The pack is on the eastern ridge, exactly where the falsified data said they weren't, exactly where I told Luke they'd be. He is waiting for me to say go.
I have not said go.
Need one more day. Tomorrow.
Luke: You said that yesterday. Come to the cabin tonight.
I look at the test.
Working late.
Luke: Tomorrow then.
I put the phone down. Pick up my field notebook. The letters swim.
I am pregnant.
The word sits in the apartment like a third person.
At four-fifteen, boots on the stairs. I know Luke's footfall the way I know his truck engine, the way I know the exact pressure of his hand on my lower back in a room full of people.
I have the test off the table and in the bathroom cabinet behind the ibuprofen before his knuckle hits the door.
The speed of it shames me. The necessity of it does not.
He fills the doorway. Hat off, sleeves rolled, dust on his jeans. His hair is curling at his neck again and his eyes find the rebuilt collar maps spread across my counter before they find me.
"You said tomorrow."
"I said working late."
He steps inside without being invited, which is not new. What is new is the way he scans the apartment. Not looking at me. Looking at the windows. The door lock. The fire escape.
"Drove past Cutter's place on the way back from the ranch. He's got company. Two trucks I don't recognize. Billings plates."
"Consortium contacts."
"That's my guess." He turns from the window and looks at me fully for the first time. His gaze drops once, brief, to my mouth, and I watch the discipline it costs him to bring it back up.
"That's two more sets of eyes in the valley. Two more people who know where you live and what you're documenting."
"I am a federal biologist with institutional backing and a documentation protocol."
"You are a woman alone above a bakery with a lock I could open with a credit card." He crosses to the counter where my maps are spread. Picks up the edge of the satellite overlay and sets it down without reading it. His palms find the counter's edge and stay there. "I want you at the cabin."
"You want me where you can see me."
"Yes." Flat. No apology. No follow-up. The word sits between us and lands harder than the argument did.
"I need to be here. My equipment, my data, my field station."
"You can run it from anywhere with a laptop and a cell signal."
"Luke."
"Mags."
We stare at each other across six feet of kitchen and eight days of something he cannot see.
His jaw is set. Mine is too. The blue of his eyes has gone dark the way it does when something is costing him, and he is looking at me like a man who has learned exactly what loss costs and is already doing that math.
I cross the six feet. His hands are on me before I finish arriving. One at my waist, one curled around the back of my neck, his thumb tracing behind my ear. I tilt my face up and he kisses me, slow and thorough, tasting like mint with coffee underneath.
The kiss deepens. He pulls me flush against him by the small of my back and I feel exactly how worried he's been all afternoon, pressed hard against my hip.
My fingers curl into his shirt. His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, the curve of my neck just below my ear, and the sound I make is involuntary.
I want to pull him to my bed and let eight hours of his hands burn through the eight days I've been carrying alone.
I put my hand on his chest.
"Wait."
He stops. Completely. No negotiation, no half-second of momentum, no question. His arms go still and his mouth lifts and he looks at me.
The restraint costs him. I feel it in the tension of his forearms, the controlled breath, his fingers pressing once into my back before they ease.
He does not move. He does not ask why. He stands in my kitchen with his body still hard against mine and gives me the silence without making me pay for it.
"Not tonight," I say. My voice is not steady.
He searches my face. Whatever he finds there, he files without naming. His thumb traces my cheekbone once and then his arms drop.
"Okay."
One word. No argument. No wounded look.
You eaten?" he asks.
"Luke—"
"Have you eaten?"
I look at him. He's looking back at me the same way he always does. Like he has nowhere else to be, like the answer genuinely matters. I think about the thing sitting at the bottom of my chest like a stone and I think, not yet, not tonight, and I say:
"No."
He nods once and moves past me toward the refrigerator. I stand in the middle of my kitchen and watch him open it, assess it, close it again without comment about the state of it.
"I can do eggs," he says. "Or I can go get something."
"You don't have to?—"
"I know I don't." He's already found the pan. "Eggs or not eggs?"
"Eggs," I say, because it's easier than the alternative.
He makes them simple. Salt, a little butter, the burner lower than I'd use. He doesn't talk much and I don't either.
I watch his back and think about how he doesn't know. He is standing in my kitchen making me eggs and he doesn't know that something has changed. Something is still changing. Something I haven't said out loud to anyone yet, not even myself in the mirror, and I'm not going to say it tonight.
We take the plates to the couch and eat. Somewhere in the middle of it I end up with my legs across his lap and neither of us marks the moment it happened.
He sets his empty plate on the coffee table and his hand comes to rest on my ankle, loose and warm, not going anywhere.
At some point I realize I'm nearly asleep. His hand hasn't moved. I can feel his breathing slow and steady through where my calves rest against him.
"Hey." His voice is low. "I'm gonna head out."
I sit up and he helps, one hand steadying my elbow, matter-of-fact. He picks up his hat from the counter.
"Lock the door behind me. Both locks."
"Luke."
"Both."
I nod. He holds my eyes for two beats. Then he puts his hat on, touches my chin with his knuckle, and walks out.
I listen to his boots on the stairs. His truck starting in the alley below, the diesel catch and settle. The sound pulling away down Main Street until it folds into the distance and the apartment is mine again.
I walk to the bathroom. Open the cabinet. Take the test from behind the ibuprofen and bring it back to the kitchen table.
Below me, Willa pulls a tray from the oven. The building hums with someone else's ordinary Thursday.
I sit down and put both hands flat on the table.
"I'm pregnant."
The apartment does not answer. The test does not change.
The light moves one degree and I sit there with the word, alone, the way I need to be before I can figure out what it means with anyone else in the room.