Chapter Fifteen
~ Caleb ~
I woke at five-thirty to the cast-iron stove ticking warm enough to chase the pre-dawn chill and the smell of pine smoke mingling with fresh coffee.
The bunkhouse was quiet. The kind of quiet that meant Sterling was still asleep, which was its own kind of miracle, and I wasn’t about to interrupt it.
The kitchen waited. I moved through it in the half-dark, bare feet on cold floorboards, pulling the coffeepot off the heat before it could boil over.
The drip basket still held grounds from yesterday.
I dumped them into the compost bucket Mitch had rigged by the back door—he was serious about compost in a way that was genuinely admirable and occasionally annoying—and measured fresh, palm-fulls, no scoop because I knew exactly how much by touch.
Water over grounds. The sound was patient. I set it on the range to percolate and got the skillet heating—the double one, the heavy one with the warped handle that I’d claimed as mine because nobody else seemed to want it, which was their loss.
Eggs from the fridge. Six. Then eight. Then I lost count, cracking them one-handed the way I’d been doing since I was twelve, because sharing a kitchen with Mitch meant you learned to do everything one-handed or you learned to do without.
The yolks held. Amber in the pale gold light that was just starting to brush the east window, turning the mismatched mugs on the open shelving from shadow into something warm.
I hummed. Something tuneless. Something from the radio station Jojo left on in the barn, a country song about roads and leaving that I’d heard so many times I could hum the guitar part without thinking about the words.
The words were sad. The guitar part was not.
I hummed the guitar part and let the words stay where they were.
The doorway stayed empty. I kept peeking at it anyway, imagining Sterling’s face. The particular set of his jaw when he first walked into a room. The way his eyes did that thing—cataloguing, assessing, the operational part of his brain mapping the space before he decided whether to enter it.
I’d been watching that face for months. Watching him decide, over and over, whether the kitchen was worth entering. Whether the eggs were worth staying for.
The coffee finished. I poured a mug. Left it on the table in front of his usual chair.
Black. No cream, no sugar, the way he took it, and the fact that I knew how he took his coffee was something I tried not to examine too closely because examining it made it real, and real was still new enough to be delicate.
Then he was there.
Sterling slipped into the kitchen before Mitch ever showed.
Bare-chested, yesterday’s jeans riding low on his hips, the gun holstered on his nightstand because even Sterling Callahan left his gun somewhere when he slept, which was progress.
His jaw was shadowed with dark stubble. His hair was pushed back from his forehead like he’d run his hands through it, like he’d slept better than he expected and was about to file a complaint about it.
He sat at the table without hesitation. The chair creaked under his weight, the unique sound of Sterling occupying a space he’d decided belonged to him, and that small, unremarkable act landed in my chest like a brick.
Weeks of watching him hover. Weeks of Sterling standing in doorways, considering, his weight braced on that bad leg, his eyes doing the full perimeter assessment of a kitchen before he committed to crossing the threshold. And here he was. Bare feet on the floorboards. Mug in hand. Sitting.
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to. The skillet hissed. Eggs bubbled at the edges. I flipped them with the spatula, one-handed, and watched Sterling from the corner of my eye.
He looked around the kitchen. His eyes moved across the open shelving, the mismatched mugs, the wood stove ticking in the corner, the east window where the light was going from pale to gold. He took a sip of coffee. Set the mug down. Looked at me.
“You made eggs,” he said. Flat. His voice was rough from sleep, lower than usual, the tone he used for observations that weren’t questions.
“I did,” I said.
“You didn’t have to.”
“I know.”
“I’m saying you didn’t have to.”
“And I’m saying I know.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Drank his coffee.
I counted that as a complete victory and turned back to the range.
The eggs were Wednesday good. Committed. They knew what they were about. I slid them onto a plate and set it in front of him.
He looked at the plate. Then at me. His jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped once, and I watched him decide whether to acknowledge the eggs or eat them without comment, which was Sterling’s version of gratitude.
He ate them without comment. Fork to plate, methodical, the way he did everything—treating food as fuel rather than pleasure, though I’d caught him enjoying things more than he wanted to admit.
The scrape of metal against ceramic filled the quiet kitchen.
Butter melted into toast. Coffee steamed in the mug he’d refilled himself.
I watched his forearm flex as he cut into the eggs.
The tattoos caught the light—something Cyrillic across his left pec, a date in small block numbers along his collarbone, ink that meant something to the man wearing it and nothing to anyone else.
The longest scar ran from his sternum to his hip, thin and white, a story he would never tell and I had stopped asking about.
His body sat differently in the chair this morning.
Looser. The rigid set of his shoulders had softened overnight, or maybe over the course of several consecutive nights, and the change was measurable.
Quantifiable. The kind of thing you noticed when you’d been watching someone long enough to see the armor crack.
He finished. Set his fork down with the same deliberate care he applied to everything. Looked at the empty plate for a second too long, like he was deciding whether to acknowledge it.
Then he reached across and took the last piece of toast off my plate.
Held eye contact the entire time.
I watched his hand, his fingers, the confidence of a man who took what he wanted and expected to be allowed, and the expectation, somehow, had become its own kind of permission.
I did not reach for the toast. I did not call him on it.
I drank my coffee and watched him eat toast he had stolen from my plate with the focused determination of a man conducting a tactical operation, and the warmth of it—Sterling, here, taking things that belonged to me, and me letting him—landed in my chest with a weight that had nothing to do with the wood stove.
The cast-iron range ticked. The east window went full gold. Beyond the glass, the ranch was waking—distant low of cattle, the creak of the barn door, the unique sound of Montana morning settling into its bones.
I turned back to the range. There were more eggs to make.
Mitch would be hungry. Mitch was always hungry, the way he was always late and always grinning about it, and Sterling would sit at this table and drink his coffee and stay, and the staying was the thing I’d been waiting for since approximately week two.
The skillet waited. I cracked another egg. The yolk held.
Twenty minutes later the back door slammed open and the kitchen filled with Mitch. He swaggered in like he owned the place, which he kind of did, or at least operated on that assumption with enough confidence that nobody bothered correcting him.
His hat was on sideways, pushed back so the brim framed his face in a way that he absolutely thought was charming. Fresh dirt on his boots. A scratch ran along his right forearm, angry red against tanned skin, from elbow to wrist in a clean line that said fence wire, not a branch.
I pointed at the first-aid kit on the shelf without looking up from the skillet.
“I’m fine,” he barked.
“I know,” I said, and pointed again.
Mitch shrugged, reaching for the coffeepot with his unscratched arm. “That scratch is decorative. Adds character. You wouldn’t understand the aesthetic.”
“That’s a fascinating medical opinion,” I muttered. The eggs were bubbling. I flipped them. “Jojo would like a word about your definition of decorative tissue damage.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“I’m aware. I was there for most of them.
” The foster home in Billings. The shed roof in Helena.
The time he’d taken a swing at a kid twice his size because the kid had called me something that rhymed with nothing polite.
I’d been there for all of it. Twenty-four years of my brother acquiring scars and pretending they were accessories.
Then Sterling rose without a word.
I felt it before I saw it—the shift in the kitchen air, the particular stillness that happened when Sterling Callahan decided to move. He crossed to the shelf in three strides, pulled the first-aid kit down, and set it on the table in front of Mitch with the flat finality of a closed door.
The sound of plastic on wood was decisive. Final. The kind of sound that did not invite discussion.
Mitch stared at the kit. Then at Sterling, who stood unmoved with his arms crossed, his jaw set in that particular way that said he had made a decision and the decision was not negotiable. The scratch on Mitch’s arm glowed angry in the morning light.
Mitch blinked. “You too?”
“There are two of us now,” I said from the range. “You’re outnumbered.”
“This is a violation of my civil rights,” Mitch grumbled. He was already reaching for the kit. The grumbling was dramatic, but low toned. I’d seen this routine approximately nine hundred times—Mitch objecting on principle while his body did exactly what someone had told him to do.