Chapter 2
Gabriel
I can't stop thinking about the preacher's daughter, and it is officially annoying me.
It's Monday. I've got a bike half-stripped in the garage bay, a carburetor problem that should be eating all my attention, and instead I keep replaying the exact sound she made when she laughed at her own joke back at me — not enough time before lunch — like it's a song stuck in my head on a loop I didn't ask for.
"You're doing the thing again," Diesel says, not looking up from the engine he's got his head buried in.
"What thing."
"The staring-at-nothing thing. You've done it four times since Saturday. I counted."
"I'm thinking about torque specs."
"You're thinking about torque specs the way I think about my ex-wife's lasagna. Which is to say, not really about the lasagna."
I flip him off without looking up, which he takes, correctly, as a concession.
"She fold you a paper crane yet?" Diesel asks, grinning behind his wrench.
"How do you—"
"Nadia. Nadia knows everything. Don't ask me how, it's genuinely frightening."
Here's the thing about Ruth Calloway that's bothering me: she's not what I expected.
I expected a church mouse. Polite, brittle, a little scared of us, counting the minutes until she could hand off her clipboard and drive back to whatever safe, beige life she keeps behind that parsonage door.
Instead I got a woman who looked me dead in the eye and made a joke about my soul like she'd been saving it up for exactly the right moment, and then admitted, unprompted, to folding paper birds during her own father's sermons.
And then there was the other thing. The nothing.
I've been in enough group homes, foster placements, and court-mandated counseling sessions to know exactly what it sounds like when somebody's protecting something.
Nothing isn't nothing. Nothing is a door somebody's leaning their whole body against, hoping you won't notice the weight it takes to keep it shut.
I want to know what's behind Ruth Calloway's door.
That's the part that's annoying me, because wanting to know things about people is usually a fast route to caring about them, and caring about people is a fast route to watching them leave, get taken, or decide you're not worth the trouble after all.
I learned that lesson early and I learned it well, and I've spent ten years making sure I never had to learn it twice.
Doesn't stop me thinking about it, though.
"You gonna finish this carburetor or keep having a feeling at it?" Diesel asks.
"I can multitask."
"You cannot. You've had the same bolt in your hand for six minutes."
I look down. I have, in fact, had the same bolt in my hand for six minutes.
Tuesday we're back at the shelter finishing the roof, and she shows up around eleven with a tray of lemonade like this is 1955 and she's auditioning for a role in a movie about small-town virtue.
I watch her set the tray down on the folding table, say something kind to Mrs. Petraki, laugh at something Harper says, and the whole time there's this — I don't know what to call it.
This flicker. Like a light behind a curtain, on for half a second, gone before you can be sure you saw it.
"You painting a picture up there, or fixing a roof?" she calls up to me, shading her eyes against the sun.
"Studying my subject," I call back. "Artistic process. Very sensitive work, this."
"Is that so."
"Come up and see."
"I am not climbing a ladder in this dress, Gabriel Mercer."
First time she's used my full name. I like it more than I should. It sounds different coming from her — less like a rap sheet, more like an actual name a person might use for a person they actually see.
"Suit yourself," I say, and go back to hammering, and I catch her watching me for a second longer than strictly necessary before she turns back to the lemonade table, and something in my chest does a slow, unfamiliar roll.
At lunch she sits a little apart from the others, on an overturned bucket, eating a sandwich she brought from home, and I bring my own lunch over and sit down next to her without asking, because I've never once in my life waited for an invitation and I'm not about to start now.
"You always eat alone?" I ask.
"I'm not alone. You're here."
"Fair."
She unwraps the second half of her sandwich, offers me half of it without looking at me, like it's not a big deal, like it doesn't mean anything, and I take it because refusing feels like it would mean more than accepting does.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
"You're going to whether I say yes or not."
"Probably true." I take a bite, chew, watch her face while I ask it. "What do you do, Ruth Calloway? When nobody's looking. When you're not teaching Sunday school or leading the choir or organizing charity drives or being the good preacher's daughter. What's the nothing?"
She goes very still. Just for a second. Then she laughs, but it's not the real laugh from Thursday — it's the careful one, the performed one, the one I'd bet money she gives everyone in that church every single week.
"That's a strange question."
"I'm a strange guy."
"I don't do anything, Gabriel. I don't have some secret double life."
"I didn't say double life. I said nothing. You already told me that yourself, remember? Up until two in the morning three nights this week, doing nothing."
Her jaw tightens. For a second I think I've pushed too far, and I'm about to apologize, actually apologize, which isn't something I do often, when she says, very quietly, not looking at me:
"I paint."
Two words. Handed over like they cost her something real.
"Yeah?" I say, careful now, like I'm holding something fragile. "What do you paint?"
"Places I've never been." She's still not looking at me, tearing a piece of crust off her sandwich and not eating it, just tearing it, over and over, into smaller and smaller pieces.
"I've never left this state, Gabriel. Never been on a plane.
Never seen the ocean except in pictures.
But I paint mountains I've never climbed and cities I've never walked through and I don't — I don't know why I'm telling you this. "
"Because I asked," I say. "Most people don't actually ask. They just want the version of you that fits in the frame they've already built."
She looks at me then, really looks, like I've said something that landed somewhere she wasn't expecting to be hit.
"That's a very specific thing to know," she says slowly, "for somebody who fixes roofs for a living."
"I contain multitudes, preacher's daughter."
"Multitudes. Sure."
"I read a whole book once. It surprised everybody, myself included."
That gets the real laugh back, bright and startled, and something in my chest unclenches that I didn't know had been clenched.
"What's it called?" she asks. "The book."
"I'm not telling you. You'll think less of me."
"Now I have to know."
"It was about dinosaurs," I admit. "I was nine. It still counts."
"It absolutely does not count."
"It's the principle of the thing."
She's laughing properly now, the crust forgotten, and I think, watching her, that I would do quite a lot of stupid things to keep hearing that particular sound.
That night I can't sleep, which is not exactly a new problem for me, but tonight it's got a specific shape to it, a specific direction, and before I've fully decided to do it, I'm on my bike, riding the long way home past the white clapboard church on the hill.
Her window's lit. Upstairs, second from the left, past the gable — I clocked it without meaning to, the same way I clock exits in a room, out of old habit that's never quite left me.
There's a shadow moving against the curtain.
Slow, deliberate, an arm rising and falling in a rhythm that's not pacing and not undressing, that's —
I cut the engine and just sit there in the dark, watching a woman I've known for four days paint something I can't see, in a room that isn't supposed to have anything hidden in it, and I think: she's got a whole secret world in there. A whole self nobody's ever let her have.
I know exactly what that feels like. Having a whole self that doesn't fit the frame everybody's already built for you. Mine just came out as fists and trouble instead of paintbrushes and mountains. Same wound, different bandage.
The light goes off around midnight. I sit there another ten minutes in the dark before I finally kick the bike back to life and ride home, and the whole way I'm thinking the same dumb, dangerous thought on repeat.
I want in.
Wednesday morning, back at the clubhouse, Knox catches me staring at nothing over coffee — apparently it's becoming a pattern people notice, which is its own kind of humiliating — and sits down across from me with the particular expression he gets when he's about to say something I don't want to hear.
"Heard you and the reverend's girl are getting friendly," he says.
"We're fixing a roof."
"Diesel says you sat with her at lunch. Alone. On purpose."
"It's a small job site, Knox. Options were limited."
"You've also been riding past the church at midnight."
I nearly choke on my coffee. "How does anybody in this town know anything."
"Small town, small roads, and Hawk was out running a delivery." Knox's mouth twitches, not quite a smile. "You're not exactly subtle, Gabriel."
"I was just — I like that road."
"Uh-huh."
Knox looks at me for a long moment, the kind of look that's seen twenty years of my nonsense and isn't fooled by any of it, not for a second.
"Her father runs the only church in three counties," he says. "Half this town answers to him on Sundays, one way or another. We don't need that kind of war, Gabriel. Not over a girl."
"Nobody said anything about a war."