Chapter 6
Tess
The next morning, I leave him alone.
My whole instinct, the entire Tess Carter operating system, is to march up the ridge with two cinnamon rolls, a cheerful agenda, and a low-key opinion about how he’s feeling.
My mother’s child. Her precise reflex. Smother first, ask later.
The Tess my mother built would be on his porch by seven a.m., banging the door with a casserole.
I’ve been awake since five.
At five-thirty, I make coffee in my new French press, sit at my kitchen table, and make myself do nothing for an hour.
Just sit. Be a woman in a cabin who knows that another person on a porch above her needs the morning to be his own.
I think about the script. I knew the script because of my brother.
My brother was deployed twice and came home the second time with the same wound on the inside as the man on the ridge.
We went through one panic attack on a fishing dock and one episode in a Walmart parking lot before he found a doctor who taught him a four-count and a way to put his back to a wall.
He died in a car accident a year later, sober, at peace with himself and not at peace with my mother.
My family closed around the loss like a fist and never spoke of him again.
The four-count is the only thing of his I still have.
That, and a stubborn streak.
I drink my coffee. And I don’t go up.
I work on the cabin until ten, patching a screen on the back door and cleaning the firebox.
I write a list on the inside flap of the cinnamon roll bag, the way Mae did for me—what I need to learn this week, what I need to ask June, and what I need to do at the cabin that doesn’t involve climbing on the roof.
At ten, I hear footsteps on my porch. Heavy and deliberate. Familiar.
I open the door before he can knock.
Sullivan looks at me.
He’s freshly washed, hair still damp, beard trimmed slightly, the kind of grooming a man does when he’s trying to remind himself he’s a person. He’s wearing a clean flannel under a different jacket and smells like castile soap and pine.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi.”
“I made coffee.”
“I’d take coffee.”
He steps in. He’s never been inside before.
Standing in the middle of the front room, he looks around like a man visiting a place he’s been thinking about.
His eyes catch on the table because the kitchen chair I bought from Aunt Rosa’s neighbor is now at it, and the front room has the small amber rug I unrolled yesterday.
A candle burns next to a stack of romance novels I refuse to be embarrassed about.
Sullivan sits where I point, at the kitchen table. I pour him coffee and put a plate of toast in front of him. He nods and eats. The silence isn’t uncomfortable, but it has a weight to it now that we’re sharing it instead of avoiding it.
He sets his mug down, his eyes on the table. “I’d like to apologize for yesterday.”
“You don’t owe me an apology.”
“I’d like to make it anyway.”
I close my mouth.
“I lost time,” he says, choosing every word with the careful, specific attention of the man who took a single nail out of a board he wanted to preserve. “It happens. It’s not as bad as it used to be since the therapy. It hasn’t been that bad in a year. It surprised me.”
His jaw works. “I appreciate how you handled it.”
“I had practice.”
He looks up.
“My brother,” I murmur. “Two deployments. He had a script too. Different one, same idea. He died in a car accident a year after he got home, but it wasn’t—” I stop, then make myself say it. “It wasn’t because of that. He’d done a lot of work.”
Sullivan’s eyes are very pale and very steady.
“What was his name?”
“Henry.”
The smallest twitch goes through his face. “You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“Why?”
“There’s a Henry in my life too,” he says slowly. “He’s the reason I’m alive.”
I put my coffee down.
“I came up here as a favor to him. To his cousin, technically. There was a man we were looking for. Bank manager. The trail went cold before I arrived. He was already gone.”
He flexes his hand on the table. “I called Henry. Told him. Then I didn’t go back.”
“Why?”
He looks at me steadily, like a man who’s decided he isn’t going to lie to a woman whose brother shared a name with the man who saved him.
“Because Henry’s place is full of people. And down there, I’m—” He flexes his hand. “Down there, I’m a man someone has to manage. I’m a liability. Up here, I’m just—” He shakes his head. “I just am. For a while.”
“Yeah.” My eyes burn. “I get that.”
“What about you?”
I pick up my coffee. Put it down. “My family loved me out of obligation.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just waits.
“I don’t have a tragedy,” I say. “I have a grief without a funeral. My mother is alive. My father is alive. My sister calls me twice a year to tell me how I’m wrong.”
“That’s a specific number.”
“Twice. Every year. Very consistent.”
His exhale is a small, soft sound.
I look at the table. “They lost Henry, and they reorganized themselves around the loss in a way that didn’t include him and didn’t include me when I tried to bring him up. So I”—I shrug—“I stopped bringing him up.”
Silence.
“Tess.”
“I’m fine. That part’s old.” I turn my mug in a slow circle. “The aunt thing is newer. Aunt Rosa was my mom’s older sister. The black sheep. I hadn’t seen her since I was nine.”
“Is she…”
“She died eighteen months ago.” I clear my throat. “She left me a falling-down cabin in Colorado. And a typed letter.”
He’s very still.
“It said—” My voice does something I don’t want it to do. I push through it. “‘This place was a comfort to me when I had no one. May it be the same for you.’”
“Christ.”
“Yeah.” I wipe my cheek. “She knew. Somehow. I don’t know how, but she knew.”
“Tess.”
“I’m okay.”
He reaches across the table and places his huge, calloused hand over mine, very carefully. “I’m not asking if you’re okay.”
We don’t move.
The moment is a small, contained thing—two adults who have shared the names of the people who saved them, holding hands across a kitchen table while their coffee cools.
Outside, the wind comes east.
“Sullivan,” I whisper, “why are you telling me this?”
“Because”—his thumb moves slowly across my knuckle—“I sat with myself last night and asked what kind of man does not, at minimum, return the courtesy.”
A laugh hiccups out of me. “The courtesy?”
“I don’t have a better word.”
After a long time, I clear my throat. “Do you want another piece of toast?”
He smiles, the first real smile I’ve seen on his face. “I’ll take another piece.”
We work on the cabin together that afternoon.
The roof needs a better pass than what Aunt Rosa’s neighbor had been doing.
There’s a soft spot above the back bedroom that, when Sullivan stands at the eaves and presses upward with the heel of his hand, gives a sound that even I, the woman who travels with everything but a moisture meter, can identify as a problem.
“How bad?” I ask from below.
“Not bad yet. Bad next snow.”
“And the next snow is—”
“Forecast for tomorrow.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
He climbs down off the ladder. He’s back in his work jacket, the clean flannel from this morning replaced with a worn denim button-up, sleeves rolled to the elbow. His forearms are a study in scars and ropy muscle that I’m trying to be a grown adult about.
“I’ll patch it,” he says. “Tonight, before the storm. It’s not a fix; it’s a stall. The whole roof needs to come off in May.”
“In May,” I repeat. “Sullivan—”
“It’s a tarp, three sheets of pressure-treated plywood, and a few hours of my time, Tess. Don’t argue.”
“I wasn’t going to argue. I was going to thank you.”
“Don’t.”
“Then I’ll just think it at you. Loudly.”
He drops his head and laughs, a real one, a full, rough laugh that shakes his shoulders. The laugh is better than I had imagined it would be.
I lean against the side of my cabin and watch him, and I think, oh. Oh, no.
I’m going to be a problem to myself.
By dusk, the patch is on. Three sheets of plywood, a tarp like a sail, the whole back corner of my cabin reinforced with the overkill of a man who’s spent a portion of his life building things to hold against gunfire would consider proportionate.
Sullivan climbs down off the ladder as snow comes in sideways from the ridge. His face is gray with effort, and his lips are colorless from the cold.
“Go inside,” I order.
“Go inside?”
“Yes. Go inside. Right now. You’re not going back up that trail in the dark in this.”
“It’s not a trail. It’s a hundred yards.”
“It’s a hundred yards in horizontal snow, Mercer. Sit by my fire. Eat. Then go.”
“Tess.”
“Mercer, this is nothing other than what it is, which is a grown woman feeding a grown man dinner because he just spent four hours saving her bedroom from collapse.”
He looks at me the way he looked at me on the porch step yesterday after the four-count, and his eyes do something I can’t put a name to.
“All right,” he says.
I nod. “Stew?”
“Stew.”
We go inside as the snow comes down and the wind takes a hard, mean turn around the side of the cabin.
Somewhere up the ridge, a tree I do not yet know about is bending under a weight it will not be able to hold.