Chapter 10 #2
She started talking, fast, the words tripping over each other—something about a dog, an inspection, a fence, a foster, a woman named Claire, the harbor road.
I caught about one word in three. She heard herself somewhere in the middle of it, the way she always could, and her mouth shut and her cheeks went pink.
"It's okay," I told her. "Slow down. It's okay."
Around us, the morning kept moving without permission.
The other men had gone on toward the house, peeling off in twos, and Brock among them threw me a look on his way up the steps—pointed two fingers at the big front doors, meaning inside, when you're done, take your time—and put a wink on the end of it that he and I would be having words about later.
There was a woman by Mags's dusty car. She hadn't gone in with the others. She stood with her arms loosely crossed and her head tipped, watching the two of us with a grin she wasn't bothering to hide, the open delight of a person who's just seen something better than they came expecting.
"So," she said. "This is Cash."
Mags turned to her, thrown. "You—how do you know—"
"I didn't know you two knew each other." The woman's eyes moved between us, quick and bright and missing nothing, a journalist's attention behind all that warmth. "I would absolutely have led with that."
I didn't know what to do with the fact that she had my name.
That she knew it, and knew Mags, and stood in the courtyard of whatever Dominion Hall was, looking entertained that the two of us had collided in it.
For half a breath, the floor tilted a different direction and an old, cold thought walked through me—that this was a setup, that I'd been steered, that nothing about a black jet and a strange city and her standing in my brothers' fortress was an accident.
Then, I let it go.
I read the woman the way I read everyone, and there was no hand on a string in her.
Nothing rehearsed. Only genuine surprise wearing a grin.
This was a coincidence. A long, ugly, beautiful coincidence, the kind the universe deals you now and then to remind you it's still in the room.
Nothing more. I made myself believe it, because the alternative was a hole I didn't have time to climb down into.
I looked back at Mags, and I remembered the message. The one I'd read three times and answered with nothing.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Your text. I saw it. I should've written back." The truth, or the part of it I could give her in a courtyard. "I'm in town for work. It came up fast."
Work. The word did something to her face.
She glanced past me, toward the big doors where the last of the men were disappearing into the house—the hard, plain-clothed, quiet-eyed men I'd ridden in with, men whose whole bearing said the same thing mine did.
I watched her put it together. I watched her see what I was, again, the way she'd seen it in Virginia Beach.
A man who went where these men went. A man whose work flew him across oceans and walked him into fortresses and would, sooner or later, fly him back out of them.
Something in her went quiet. A sadness came down over the brightness, gentle, like a cloud crossing the sun.
I knew that sadness. I'd put it on her once before, in a parking lot, and called it the kindest thing I could do.
"Hey," I said.
She came back to me, her eyes lifting.
And here is where I did the thing I'd spent two nights and every good reason in the world telling myself I would not do.
"Since we're both here," I heard myself say, "how about dinner? You can show me your town."
I shouldn't have. I knew it as it left my mouth.
Every careful wall I'd built in that hotel room, every line I'd typed and erased, every sound argument about a life she'd never understand and a door I wasn't going to drag her through—I'd meant all of it.
I still did. And I asked her to dinner, anyway, because some pull older than my discipline reached up through the floor of me and asked it for me.
A man who fears nothing turns out to be no match at all for the one thing he wants.
She hesitated. I watched her weigh it, the wanting and the wariness both.
Then, she nodded.
"Okay," she said. "Yeah. I've got a couple of spots now. Nothing fancy."
"I don't need fancy." That landed between us, both of us hearing the lo mein in it, the cheap Chinese on a Valentine's she'd told me twice not to mark. "It'd be good to catch up. That's all."
That's all. We both let the lie stand, because it was a kind one.
It went a little awkward then, the way these things do once the running and the catching are over and two grown people are left standing in the daylight with their whole history laid out between them.
She didn't hug me again. She smiled instead, smaller now, shyer—the careful smile of a woman who'd just decided to risk something and didn't know yet what it would cost her.
"Call me when you're done," she said. "With—whatever this is. Your day." She didn't look at the house when she said it, which was its own kind of looking. "I'm usually done with work around five."
"I'll call."
"Okay." A beat. "Okay."
She went to her car. Got in and started it, the engine turning over rough and familiar against all that silent, expensive metal around it.
And before she pulled away, she looked at me one more time through the open window—a long look, the kind that travels back over years, remembering, I think, all of it, the good and the closed door both.
She smiled at me, sad at the edges, and drove off down that green tunnel of a road, and was gone.
I watched her go. I always watch a thing leave.
The woman was still there. She let out a little laugh, soft, mostly to herself, and shook her head.
"Oh," she said. "You two have got it bad. Both of you. Must be something in the water."
And then, she walked up toward the house and left me alone in that courtyard full of fortress and dark cars and steaming stone—a man who'd come halfway around the world to find what his brothers couldn't see, standing there instead with a dinner he never should have asked for, and no idea, none at all, what the universe meant to do with me next.