Chapter 10
Too Close
~
She stayed later than she meant to, after the manifest and Danny Fisk's name and the long, careful silence that had followed both, because leaving had started to feel like the wrong shape for the evening and she hadn't found the right one to replace it with.
They'd moved from the office out to the front step of the clubhouse at some point without either of them suggesting it, sitting on the worn concrete with two mismatched mugs of the same bad coffee that seemed to be the only beverage this club knew how to make, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched and neither of them adjusted to close the gap or widen it.
The night had come in cool and clear, stars doing the thing they only did out here away from any real light pollution, and for a while neither of them said anything that needed saying, which by now she recognized as its own kind of conversation between them.
"You didn't have to tell me all that," she said eventually.
"I know."
"Why did you?"
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer at all, which had become its own familiar rhythm, except this time when he spoke his voice had lost some of the careful control she'd gotten used to hearing in it.
"Because I've spent fifteen years deciding, every single time, that the safest thing was to say less.
And somewhere in the last few weeks I stopped believing that was actually keeping anyone safer. Mostly it was just keeping me alone."
"That's not nothing to admit."
"No." He looked over at her then, and something in his face had gone unguarded in a way she hadn't seen from him before, not even at the depot, not even with his hands still shaking faintly with adrenaline after Boyd's men backed down. "You want to know something stupid?"
"Always."
"I've been trying to figure out for three weeks what it is about you that made all that easier to say tonight than it's been to say to anyone in fifteen years.
Haven't landed on an answer that makes sense yet.
" His eyes stayed on hers, steady, unhurried, the same way he did everything. "Might just be you."
The porch light behind them had gone out at some point without either of them noticing, one of those motion-sensor bulbs that gave up after enough stillness, and she was grateful for it now in a way she wouldn't have expected — the dark made the space between them feel smaller, more private, like the whole night had narrowed down to this one step of concrete and the two mugs going cold in their hands.
She could smell the leather of his cut and something underneath it, motor oil and clean sweat and whatever soap he used, and she was aware, with an intensity that embarrassed her a little, of the exact half-inch of air left between his knee and hers.
The air between them had changed shape sometime in the last minute without either of them announcing it, gone thick and close in a way that made her aware of exactly how little space separated his shoulder from hers, how easy it would be to close the rest of it.
She felt herself leaning, or maybe he was, or maybe it was both of them at once, some current neither of them had decided to follow but were following anyway, his eyes dropping briefly to her mouth and back up in a way that answered a question she hadn't asked out loud.
Her phone rang.
The sound of it landed like a physical thing, sharp enough that they both flinched back half an inch, and she felt the moment fracture even as some stubborn, disappointed part of her wanted to let it ring out unanswered.
She didn't. Three weeks into this job had taught her that a call this late rarely meant nothing.
"Doyle," she answered, and listened to Deputy Park's voice come through fast and clipped — a report from a county contact on the insurance side, the wrecked box truck's actual point of origin finally traced through a secondary shipping record, and the answer wasn't a warehouse three counties over the way she'd expected.
It was a stretch of unmarked land off County Road 6, close enough to the Kingsmen's own property line that the coordinates practically overlapped.
She relayed it to Silas once she'd hung up, watching his face change as he heard it, watched him do the same fast math she'd just done.
"That's not our land," he said, before she'd even finished. "That's the old Petrakis lot next door. We lease grazing rights off it sometimes, nothing more."
"I believe you."
"You don't have to believe me. The county records will show it.
" Something had gone tight in his jaw, the first real alarm she'd seen from him since the depot, and she could tell, watching it, exactly how much this piece of news cost him — not because it implicated his club, but because it meant whatever this was had been operating close enough to his own front door that he hadn't noticed it happening.
"I need to walk that line myself. Tonight. "
"Then we walk it together. Tomorrow, daylight, with actual backup, not two people improvising in the dark on adrenaline and bad coffee." She said it steady, the way he'd have said it to her a week ago, and watched something in him recognize the mirror and yield to it. "Tonight, I need to go home."
He didn't argue. He walked her to her cruiser instead, close and quiet, and if either of them was thinking about the two inches of air that had separated their mouths twenty minutes earlier, neither of them said so, though she caught him looking at her once, briefly, before she pulled the door shut, in a way that told her the wanting hadn't gone anywhere. It had just been asked to wait.
~ ~ ~
The house was dark when she got home, the way it always was now, and she sat in the driveway a while before she made herself go inside.
She went back to the spare room instead of her own, because some nights the case pulled her there whether she meant to go or not, and this was going to be one of those nights whether she admitted it to herself first or not.
Her father's box sat where it always sat, and she pulled it open and went past the case files this time, down to the bottom where she'd never let herself look too long — the personal things, the parts of him that weren't evidence.
His reading glasses, folded. A church raffle ticket he'd never redeemed.
A photograph of the two of them at her academy graduation, him in his good jacket, grinning in a way she barely remembered him doing that often.
She sat on the floor with the photograph in her hands and let herself cry for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, not for Silas, not for the manifest, not even for Danny Fisk, a boy she'd never met whose death had apparently shaped a man's whole life — but for her father, for the decade he'd spent chasing something true wrapped inside a story that was wrong, for the three months he'd been careless because he'd finally believed he was close, for every year she'd spent hating a man who might have been trying, in his own guarded way, to keep her father alive.
She remembered, without wanting to, the drive home from that same academy graduation, her father quiet behind the wheel in a way that wasn't like him, and when she'd finally asked what was wrong he'd said only that he hoped she'd learn to trust her own read on people better than he'd trusted his.
She hadn't made sense of it then. She'd assumed, the way a twenty-two-year-old assumed most things about a parent, that it was about someone at work, some old grudge that had nothing to do with her.
Sitting on the floor of the spare room three years and one manifest later, she wondered now if he'd already started to suspect, even then, that he'd spent a decade aiming his whole life at the wrong target, and hadn't known yet how to say so out loud to the daughter who'd built her own sense of right and wrong on the back of his certainty.
She didn't know yet what to do with all of it.
She sat with the photograph until the crying stopped on its own, the way it always eventually did, and then she put everything back in the box except the photograph, which she kept out, propped against the lamp on the desk where she'd see it every morning from now on.
Tomorrow she'd walk a fence line with a man her father had spent a decade calling the enemy, looking for whatever had been operating close enough to touch them both without either of them noticing.
Tonight, she let herself grieve, and didn't apologize to anyone for taking the time to do it.