Chapter 36
He woke up to her hand on his back.
Her palm flat between his shoulder blades, warm and still, so light he almost didn't feel it. Then her fingers moved. Slow. Tracing the line of his spine down and back up and down again, careful, as if he might disappear if she stopped.
He kept his eyes closed. The room was bright behind his eyelids.
Morning. The marsh light that came through the bedroom window at this hour, the light he'd been waking up to alone for a month, was different with her in it.
Not warmer. Not softer. Present in a way it hadn't been.
Like the room remembered what it was for.
Her body was against his side. Her hip. Her ribs.
The heat of her coming through the sheet in a line that ran from his shoulder to his knee.
She was lying on her stomach with her face turned toward him and her hand on his back and she was touching him like he was the most important thing in the world.
He was still hurt. The anger hadn't left.
It had quieted in the yard, compressed by the holding and the moonlight and the words she'd said into his shirt, but it was still in him.
A bruise in the muscle after the swelling goes down.
It was there when he moved. It was there now, underneath her hand, underneath the warmth, a tenderness that wasn't going away overnight.
But her hand was on his back. And the day was already better.
He rolled over.
She was looking at him. Her eyes were clear and her face was bare and her hair was loose on the pillow and she'd been crying at some point in the night because the skin under her eyes was swollen and faintly pink. She didn't try to hide it. She didn't look away.
"I missed you every second I was gone," she said.
He held her eyes. The words landed in the quiet of the room and stayed there. Six words. No act. No speech. The simplest version of a month of silence, delivered by a woman lying next to him in a bed she'd left four weeks ago.
He reached for her face. His right hand.
The knuckles were still swollen, purple fading to yellow at the edges, the fracture living in the stiffness when he closed his fingers.
But the hand worked. It reached her cheek and his thumb settled there and the ache in the knuckles was small compared to what it was touching.
"What made you come back?"
She didn't answer right away. She studied him, reading him, taking inventory. Then she said it.
"Without you the world's standing still." She put her hand over his on her cheek. "When I'm with you it's moving."
He kissed her. Slow. His mouth on hers and her hand on his hand on her face and the kiss was not urgent and it was not desperate and it was not the yard. It was the morning. Two people back in the same bed on the same island and the being there was enough for now.
When he pulled back she was smiling. Small. Real. The smile he'd fallen in love with on a beach in October, the one that had nothing to do with an audience.
"I'm meeting the girls at nine to discuss contract terms," he said. "Assuming the workout goes to plan."
Her smile shifted. Not fading. Reorganizing. He watched her process it, the gears turning behind her eyes, the bartender's instinct to read the room recalibrating to the fact that the room was a bed and the subject was his career.
"I want to be there," she said. "If you want me there."
"I have an apartment in Atlanta. It's nice." He turned onto his back and stared at the ceiling. "It's nothing special though. It has a parking garage. I have a second Range Rover in the parking garage. That's it. Two nice vehicles. Everything else is normal."
"Okay," she said.
"Last time you heard numbers and panicked. I've got a lot of money. I have a financial guy who handles the investments and Riley/Banks handles the rest. I really live a pretty normal life." He turned his head to look at her. "Most of us do."
She was quiet. He let her be quiet. He'd said what he needed to say and the rest was hers and he wasn't going to fill the silence because silence had never scared him.
Center field was the quietest place on a baseball diamond.
Two hundred feet from the nearest conversation.
Nothing but grass and the warning track and your own breathing between pitches.
"Two Range Rovers is a little excessive," she said.
He laughed. It came out of him before he could catch it, the first real laugh in a month.
"One's a lease."
"Still excessive."
"I'm a ballplayer. We're allowed one indulgence."
"You have a dog. That's your indulgence."
As if hearing his name in the sentence, Hudson's tags jingled in the hallway. The click of his nails on the hardwood, easy, the gait of a dog who knew exactly where he was going and had been waiting for the right moment to go there.
He appeared in the doorway. Stopped. His tail started going.
Hudson's eyes went to Beck. Then to Kirstin. Then back to Beck. His head tilted once to the left, working something out, and then he crossed the room and jumped onto the bed and wedged himself between them with the efficiency of an animal reclaiming territory he considered permanently his.
Kirstin laughed. She buried her face in his neck. Hudson's tail was hitting Beck's leg in a steady rhythm.
"He missed you too," Beck said.
"He showed me," she said into the dog's fur. "He slept on my side the whole month."
Beck watched her. Her face in the dog's neck. Her hair across the pillow. One of his t-shirts, the gray one she must have pulled from the drawer sometime in the night. The woman who'd said she was just an island girl holding his dog in his bed in his rental on the island where she'd been born.
He got up. He went to the kitchen and opened and closed his right hand twice. The swelling was still there.
He made breakfast. Eggs, toast, the last of the bread he'd baked three days ago when baking was the only thing that kept his hands busy at night. He set two plates on the table. She came out of the bedroom in his shirt and bare feet with Hudson at her heels.
She saw the hand in the kitchen light and stopped.
"Ethan."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine."
"It's a hairline fracture. Six weeks. I've had worse."
"That's your throwing hand."
"I'm aware."
She crossed the kitchen. She took his right hand in both of hers and held it, reading it. Her thumbs on his wrist. Her fingers light on the swollen knuckles. She didn't squeeze. She didn't press. She just held it.
"This is on me," she said.
"It's on the guy who pushed Luke."
"It's on me for creating the situation."
He pulled his hand back. Gently. Letting go, not pulling away.
"We're not doing this," he said. "We're not spending the morning on blame. You came back. I'm glad you came back. The hand heals in six weeks and the workout gets pushed and it's fine."
She held his eyes for a long second. Then she nodded.
They ate. The kitchen was quiet. Two people relearning how to be in the same room. Not uncomfortable. Careful. Forks on plates and Hudson's tags and the coffeemaker finishing its cycle. She poured two cups. Set one in front of him. Sat back down.
"I need to shower," she said. "I need to go home and get clothes."
"You can wear whatever's here."
"I'm not walking into Riley/Banks in your Braves shirt."
He smiled. "You've done it before."
"That was different. That was a morning. This is a meeting."
He heard it in her voice. The shift. The woman at the kitchen table was not the woman in the bed.
This was the Kirstin who'd straightened her shoulders at his counter and said what if you did have the legal and changed the shape of three women's lives in a single sentence. This Kirstin was already working.
"Go home," he said. "Get dressed. I'll pick you up at eight thirty."
She was on the porch when he pulled up.
Jeans. A white blouse he'd never seen. Her hair pulled back.
Boots, not heels. She had a bag over her shoulder that held more than a wallet and a phone.
She locked the door and came down the steps and got in the Range Rover and the woman who got in was not the woman who'd cried in his shirt twelve hours ago.
This woman was ready.
He drove. The island passed. The oaks along Harbor Road, the marsh catching the low sun, the vendor already setting up at the market. A Tuesday morning in December. The island doing what it did regardless of what had happened on it four days ago.
He parked behind the Jeep and the Defender. He killed the engine. Kirstin didn't move.
"You okay?"
"I'm about to walk into a room with two women whose business I nearly destroyed and a man whose hand I broke."
"You didn't break my hand."
"My bar. My scene. Your hand."
He turned to her. Her eyes were on the building. The white clapboard. The tin roof. The porch Luke built. The sign. Riley/Banks. The slash over the stacked names.
The space next to it where another name had been.
"Kirstin," he said. "You told me once that you aren't a quitter. So don't quit before you walk through the door."
She closed her eyes. Opened them. Turned to him.
"Let's go," she said.
The office was warm. The heater was running. Morgan was at her desk with her clipboard and Addison was at hers with her laptop open and two extra chairs were pulled up to the worktable in the center of the room. They'd been expecting them.
Morgan's eyes came up first. They went to Beck, then to Kirstin, then to Beck's hand hanging at his side. She held on Kirstin for a second. Then it was gone and Morgan was Morgan, operational, present, already running the room before the meeting started.
"Sit down," Morgan said. "Coffee's on the counter."
Beck pulled Kirstin's chair out before he pulled his own. Kirstin sat. She set her bag on the floor beside her. Her hands went to the table, flat, the same way they'd been the last time she'd sat in this room. But her back was straight and her chin was level and her eyes were forward.
Addison closed her laptop. She folded her hands on the desk.