Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
SULLIVAN
She sleeps on her stomach.
Facedown, one arm tucked under the pillow, braids fanned across her shoulders. Her back rises and falls in a rhythm so steady it makes the whole room feel calmer. Morning light cuts through the window, turning her brown skin gold where it touches. The sheet rides low on her hips.
Beautiful. And in my bed.
For a full minute, I just watch her breathe. Then I get up, pull on jeans, and go make coffee. Because lying there cataloguing the curve of her spine while she sleeps is the behavior of a man who's getting attached, and attachment is where the trouble starts.
The next three days prove me right.
We fall into each other so easily it scares me.
She moves into my room without discussion.
Her Bible goes on my nightstand. Her clothes mix with mine in the laundry.
Mornings, she walks with me to the pasture, coffee in hand, asking about the cattle by name now because apparently she's decided each Hereford has a personality.
The spotted one near the creek is Dolly.
The cranky bull is Gerald. She named him Gerald.
Evenings, we cook together. Eat on the porch. Talk about nothing important until the sky goes dark, then she climbs into my lap on the porch swing and my hands find her hips and we don't do much talking after that.
At night, I learn her body. What makes her gasp, what makes her go quiet, where she's sensitive.
The soft inside of her wrist. The spot behind her left ear.
How she arches when I slide two fingers inside her from behind while my thumb works her clit in slow circles.
How she says my name when she comes, broken up into syllables, Sul-ly, like she's trying to hold onto it.
And every morning, waking up with her warm against my chest, the panic gets a little louder.
Because this is how it goes. You love someone.
They leave. My mother drove down this mountain when I was six.
My father's heart stopped in the north pasture when I was twelve.
Gran closed her eyes in a hospital bed three weeks ago.
Everyone I've ever loved has either walked away or been taken away, and the pattern is clear enough that even a stubborn rancher can read the signs.
Naomi is going to leave. Not today, maybe not this month, but eventually. She came here with one suitcase. A woman who packs that light is a woman who knows how to disappear.
Day seven. She tells me about Matt.
We're sitting at the kitchen table after dinner. She's got her reading glasses on, working through one of Gran's old crossword books because she discovered them last week and now she's addicted. Her pencil taps the table while she thinks.
"Sully?"
"Yeah."
"What's a five-letter word for 'imprisoned'?"
"Caged."
She writes it in. Then sets the pencil down. Takes off the glasses. Folds her hands on the table in a way that tells me something's coming.
"My ex-husband's name is Matt," she says. Calm. Measured. Every word chosen with care. "We were married for two years. He was charming when other people were watching. When they weren't, he was different."
My hands go still on my coffee mug.
"He broke my wrist the first year. Told the ER doctor I fell off a ladder changing a lightbulb." She pauses. Her eyes stay on the crossword book, not on me. "The second year, he split my lip. That's when I left."
The kitchen is dead silent. My blood is moving through my veins with a pressure that makes my temples throb.
"Where is he now?" The question comes out level. Just barely.
"Calgary. Maybe. Could be anywhere. He found me in Edmonton nine months after I left. Found me again in Saskatoon six months after that. Each time, I ran farther."
She looks up now. Those brown eyes steady despite everything she just told me. Her hands aren't shaking. Her voice doesn't break. She's delivering facts, organized, stripped clean of the terror that must have lived inside them when they were happening.
"Sanctuary Match was the farthest I could go," she says. "A woman with a new name, going to a place nobody's heard of, to live with a man nobody knows I'm with."
The information settles into my chest. Naomi Jacobs, if that's even her real name, didn't come here for a fresh start. She came here to hide.
And right behind that thought, immediate, sickening: she's in danger. On my property. In my bed. And I can't protect her any more than I could protect my mother from her own choices, or my father from his own heart, or my grandmother from time itself.
"Sully?" She's watching my face. "Say something."
What I want to say: I'll kill him if he comes anywhere near this mountain. What I want to do: lock every door on this cabin, pull her against my chest, hold on until the shaking in my hands stops.
What comes out is worse.
"How long were you planning to tell me?"
Her chin lifts slightly. "I just told you."
"After a week. After we've been sleeping together.
After you moved into my bed." Standing, I carry my mug to the sink because I need to move, need to do something with the adrenaline turning my muscles to concrete.
"You're hiding from a man who's already tracked you twice, and you didn't think that was information I needed on day one? "
"You didn't ask."
"I didn't know I needed to."
The silence between us is ugly. Nothing like the comfortable quiet of our mornings in the pasture. This silence has teeth.
"You're angry," she says.
"I'm scared." The word comes out raw. Honest in a way I didn't intend.
Turning from the sink, gripping the counter's edge behind me, I look at her.
"What happens when he finds you again? What happens when somebody in this town mentions the woman living up at the Cross place?
This isn't a city, Naomi. People talk. Everybody knows everybody. "
Her jaw tightens. "That's why I kept it to myself."
"That's why you should've told me. So I could've decided whether I was equipped to deal with it before I..." The sentence dies. Before I started caring. Before I started waking up afraid of how much I want you here. Before Gran's ghost started winning.
Her eyes narrow. She stands slowly, pressing both palms flat on the table. "Before you what?"
"This was supposed to be temporary." My voice sounds foreign to me.
Hard. The voice of a man building walls in real time.
"You needed a roof. I gave you one. But this, us, whatever this has become, it's a complication neither of us planned for, and now you're telling me there's a violent ex-husband out there who might show up at my door. "
"So send me away." Quiet. No anger. Just the resigned tone of a woman who's heard this song before. "Put me on a bus like you wanted to the first day."
My hands are shaking. I shove them in my pockets.
The smart thing to do is agree. Let her go. Protect what's left of the stone wall I've spent forty years building around the part of me that breaks when people leave. She's got one suitcase. She knows how to disappear. She'll be fine.
Except she won't. And I know that. Because the woman standing in my kitchen with her chin raised, daring me to reject her while her fingers tremble against the tabletop, is barely holding herself together.
She told me her worst secret, the heaviest thing she carries, because she trusted me enough to set it down.
And I just made her pick it back up.
"Naomi."
"Don't." She holds up one hand. "You're right. This was supposed to be temporary. I'll figure something out in the morning."
She walks past me. Down the hall. Into the spare room, where her suitcase is still stored in the closet because she never fully unpacked it there, just the dresser and the Bible. Always ready to run.
The door closes. Quiet. No slam. Somehow that's worse.
Standing alone in the kitchen, surrounded by the spices she alphabetized, the coffee she taught me to make right, the crossword book she was working through with the pencil tucked in the spine exactly the way Gran used to leave hers, I understand with brutal clarity what just happened.
She gave me her truth. I gave her my fear. And fear won.
The porch swing creaks in the night wind. Gran's swing. Gran's cabin. Gran's matchmaking scheme that brought a woman into this house who needed safety, and found a man who was too terrified of loss to give it.
Every person I've loved has left. But for the first time, standing in this empty kitchen, I'm the one who made someone go.