14. Closer
CLOSER
SLOANE
Two days I live in a house with a man I've handed every brick to, and I don't touch him, and he doesn't touch me, and it's the longest, sweetest, most unbearable stretch of my adult life.
Because that's the thing nobody warns you about taking the wall down — once the rooms are open, the wanting doesn't have anywhere left to hide either.
Before, I could tell myself it was a body, a passing thing, don't. Now I've told him about the table and he's told me about the dose, and there's not one inch of either of us the other hasn't seen, and the wanting that's left over after all that honesty isn't a body anymore.
It's the whole person. It's so much worse. It's so much better.
He still sleeps on the couch. He still gives my father his word every morning and holds the wall all day, and I still let him, because the danger is real and Walt's right and we're two people who know how to hold a line.
But the line's gone thin as paper. I catch him watching me cut limes like cutting limes is worth watching.
He catches me forgetting how a sentence ends.
Bo, who misses nothing, has started finding reasons to be in another room.
We are not fooling anybody. We're barely fooling ourselves.
Thursday the federal detail stops being careful and starts being fast.
I clock it the way I clock everything — the shift before the words.
There were two of them and now there are four.
The one who parks down the block quits pretending he's not parked down the block.
A man I don't know walks my property line at dusk with a flashlight he doesn't need, so the dark knows he's there.
They put a second thing on my phone and a third lock on the slider, and they ask me, polite as church, to stop taking my dawn run until further notice.
That one lands harder than the locks. My run is the one thing in ten years that was only mine.
They don't know that, and I don't tell them.
I just feel the walls of my own life draw in a notch, and I think: this is how it starts.
This is how they take a woman without ever laying a hand on her — make her so safe she can't breathe, and call it protection, and mean it.
Wrong enemy. These are the good ones.
Then Ruiz calls, and I take it in the office with the oak door shut, and she tells me why the gray people got fast.
"I'm going to give you two things," she says, "and neither one is good, and I'm giving them to you straight, because you've never once thanked me for soft."
"Go."
"The witness who went quiet six days ago. We found her Monday. I held it until I was sure. I'm sure now." A pause, the twenty-five-year pause. "She's gone, Ms. Mercer. The way Billings was gone. They're calling it an overdose. It wasn't."
The office goes very far away and very close at the same time. My hand's already at my wrist. I make myself ask the only question that matters to me — the selfish, human, unforgivable one.
"Was it Hannah?."
"No." And Ruiz, who does not do mercy, gives me a half second of it.
"It wasn't Hannah. The woman in Boise who named you is still unaccounted for — alive or not, I don't know, and I won't pretend I do.
But the one we lost this week was somebody else.
A bookkeeper. Forty-four. She could have put three Elders in prison, and now she can't." A breath.
"I'm sorry. I knew you were carrying the other name. "
I sit with it. Relief and grief in the same chest, fighting for the same air, and under both of them the cold thing I've felt building since the cloth on the counter.
"That's one," I say. "You said two."
"The second is why the detail doubled. We've had ears on some of their channels.
Until this week, we knew they were watching you.
We did not have you, by name, as a decision.
As of Monday, we do. Your name. Your business.
This town." Ruiz doesn't soften it. "It isn't surveillance anymore, Ms. Mercer.
You are on a list, and you are near the top of it, and the only reason you are still breathing is that you are harder to reach than the bookkeeper was — a woman with no father, no town, nobody sleeping on her couch.
You've got all three. Don't make any of them less than they are.
They're the reason you're alive. But understand what we now understand.
They've decided. The clock you're running to August is the same clock they're running.
Whoever gets there first wins, and they do not intend to come second. "
I don't say anything for a while. Ruiz lets me not say anything. She's good at that. It might be the thing I like best about her.
"You're telling me I might not make August," I say.
"I'm telling you my whole job between now and August is making sure you do.
And I'm telling you the truth instead of a comfort, because a comfort would insult you and I respect you too much for that.
" For the only time in four phone calls, her voice gives the quarter inch.
"Stay close to your people, Sloane. Whatever line you've been holding with the man on your couch — I'm a prosecutor, not a fool, I heard it in your voice the day you said yes — I'm not going to tell you how to spend the time you've got.
I've put too many good women in the ground who spent their last months being careful. "
She hangs up.
I sit in the office a long time after the line goes dead.
Here's the fear, and it's the worst kind, because it wears the mask of love.
The fear says: send them all away. Send Cole back to Eleanor's, back to his mountain, back to a truck and a life with no target painted on it.
Send Bo home to his wife. Tell my father to quit sitting at the end of my bar where a man with a rifle could find him next to me.
The fear says everyone who stands close to me is standing in the blast radius, and the only way to keep the people I love alive is to be the rabbit again — alone, running, nobody on my flank to catch a round meant for me.
I know that fear. I've lived inside it ten years. It's the exact instinct that built the wall in the first place — keep everyone out, and no one you love can be used against you. It kept me safe. It also kept me from a single day of being a person.
And I am so tired of it.
I think about Ruiz's good women in the ground who spent their last months being careful.
I think about a bookkeeper, forty-four, that I'll never meet, gone.
I think about ten years of holding every line out of fear and what it bought me, which was a fortress they strolled into in daylight whenever they pleased.
Fear didn't save me. Fear was just the thing I traded my whole life for, and the trade went bad the night my hand came down on white cotton in the dark.
If they've decided, then I get to decide too. That's the one thing they can't take unless I hand it to them. They decided I'm theirs. I get to decide I'm not — and that the time I've got, however much there is, belongs to me. To spend how I choose. On who I choose.
I open the oak door.
It's late when we finally get to the house.
Bo follows us, my father follows Bo, I flicker the porch light twice and watch his taillights take the corner the way I have for what feels like ten thousand nights — except tonight.
I'm not the woman who flickered that light last week.
Tonight I've decided something, and deciding things is the only power I've ever had that nobody could take off me.
Cole does the locks, because I let him now.
Deadbolt, lock, the dowel down in the track, the order I've done with my own hands every night of my life for the past ten years, and watching him do it is its own quiet undoing — a man learning the shape of my safety so I don't have to carry it alone.
He checks the slider. He checks the windows.
He's a wall. The best wall. My father's wall.
He turns to tell me goodnight, to take the couch, to hold the line one more night the way we've held it every night, and he gets as far as my name.
"Sloane—"
"Don't take the couch tonight."
He goes still. The whole big careful length of him, still, the way he went still in the doorway of the office the night I kissed him.
"Sloane." Rough. Holding. "I gave your father?—"
"I know what you gave my father." I cross the kitchen — the same floor where I stood last week and learned they could reach me anywhere — and I stop close enough to feel the heat come off him, close enough that he has to look down at me.
And he does. He looks down, the man who never looks down first, looks down at me like I'm the only thing in the room with a pulse.
"And I told you in that doorway. You bring nothing.
You're under orders to bring nothing. So bring nothing.
Don't bring me one single thing." I get my hand flat on his chest, over a heart going every bit as hard as mine.
"I'm not asking you to bring anything, Cole.
I'm telling you I'm done holding this line.
And you're not the one holding it anymore. I am. And I'm putting it down."
"There are men who'd use this." The last of the wall. "Use you. To get to?—"
"They've already decided to take everything I love.
Ruiz told me today. By name." My voice doesn't shake.
I've noticed it doesn't shake anymore, and tonight I finally know why — because I'm not afraid of the thing in front of me.
I'm only afraid of dying having never once reached for it.
"So I'm going to love something out loud before they get the chance.
I spent ten years being careful. I am not spending whatever's left being careful too. Not about this. Not about you."
For one more second the wall holds.
Then — the way the dam went in the office, the way I knew it would the second I quit pretending — the thread lets go, and his hand comes up into my hair, and his mouth finds mine, and this time neither one of us pulls back.
This time I take him down the hall.
The couch stays empty. The line's down. And for the first time since I was sixteen years old I walk toward a man instead of away from one — eyes open, my own name in my mouth, not one wall left standing between us — and I am not afraid.