Chapter 5 #3
Tessa’s hand closed on the radio at her belt. “You don’t give me instructions about looking after her. You gave that away on your porch.”
Jess was sitting on a cot in the garage office when I got there.
Concrete walls, good cover from the road, a vent pulling air off the side the smoke had come up.
Her purse sat between her shoes. The water Eden gave her stood unopened by her thigh, and seeing it reminded me that my wife had taken care of the woman she thought I’d gotten pregnant before she understood why that woman knew her name.
“You said she’d leave.” Jess stood when I shut the door. “You said I’d tell her, she’d take the car, and I’d go once Dez believed it. Nobody said I’d be locked in here with her.”
“The attack wasn’t part of it.” I checked the hall before I lowered my voice. “Bear thinks we may have a leak. Until we know, everybody believes the affair.”
“She couldn’t breathe.”
“I saw her use the inhaler. Leah’s with her.”
“That isn’t what I meant.” Jess turned the unopened bottle a half-turn against her knee. “She gave me that while she still thought I was a stranger at her door. Then you told her you got tired of her being sick. Was that rehearsed too?”
I had chosen that line four days ago, because Eden had to believe the whole marriage had turned into work.
Jess didn’t know what was in the burner and she didn’t know I’d taken my wife to bed the night before with the whole morning already built.
Her disgust only reached what she’d watched, and I was already trying to make it smaller.
“It had to move her.”
“She didn’t move. She went back in the house and put your clothes on the step.
” Jess wiped both hands down her jeans and stepped away when I came toward the window.
She had never once acted like she wanted me near her, and fifty thousand dollars hadn’t bought a single ounce of trust. “What do I have to do now?”
The honest answer was nothing. I looked at her and saw the red dot sitting dead center four inches under my wife’s collarbone, and I decided the plan hadn’t failed as long as the false road stayed open. A few more days.
“You stay near me in the common areas. You don’t touch me unless there’s immediate danger. If anybody asks about the baby, use the dates we practiced. When the gate opens, the Denver story goes visible and you go east under the name in the packet.”
Jess held my eyes long enough for me to hear how I’d said it. “And Eden watches.”
“Eden stays alive.”
“That wasn’t my question.” She picked up the unopened bottle, walked past me, and waited in the doorway while I called a prospect for her bag.
The next hit came after dark. A vehicle with no plates crossed the county road and opened up near the main gate while two men worked up the drainage ditch on foot.
Bear sent me to the west line. I split the defenders between the concrete and the tree cover, stopped a prospect from chasing retreating headlights into a stretch of road with one exit, and moved the garage team when rounds started finding the fuel shed.
Men do what I tell them because I have spent fifteen years learning which route turns into a trap when fear makes it look like the fastest one.
I also knew exactly where my wife was during every order I gave.
Leah had carried her medication pouch upstairs at Eden’s request. June and Tessa were inside with her.
A prospect watched the back of the house from beyond the fence line, where he couldn’t see a window or tell me one useful thing about how she was breathing.
I had authority enough to defend the building and none I could spend on asking after the woman in it without breaking the husband I’d been playing all day.
When the firing stopped, Bear moved everyone housed near the garage into the clubhouse.
Jess came through the side entrance with her bag on one shoulder, white to the lips, trying not to look toward Eden’s house.
I took the bag, because the men watching needed to see a man taking responsibility, and put myself on her exposed side for the walk across the open ground.
There was nothing in it. That private fact did nothing for my wife.
The front curtain had opened. Eden stood behind the glass in the shirt she had torn while carrying me out of our bedroom, one hand resting near the inhaler in her pocket.
Even across the yard, I knew she had put herself where my right ear would face her if I chose the house.
For five years she had taken that side without either of us asking for it.
I could cross the distance, walk her into the officers’ hall, put the photograph in her hands, and tell every armed man in earshot that the woman beside me had never been mine.
Jess waited near the clubhouse door while I looked at my wife. Eden didn’t raise a hand or step onto the porch. She watched to see which woman I would walk toward, and I used the possible leak, the laser dot, and the work I had already done to excuse another choice.
I escorted Jess into the clubhouse and didn’t look back at Eden.