"She'd understand the impulse."
Whitley took one last look at the site, the hawk still up, the pavilion going down, and turned toward her car. "You navigate, I'm putting it on the radio."
"Works for me."
The drive ran six miles of county road, limestone close on both sides before the road opened out into Bandera, low and quiet, a Sunday morning that hadn't gotten to itself yet. She put on a country station with fiddle in it and left it there without asking. I navigated. She drove. The deal we'd made.
The Road King was in the garage when we pulled up, chrome catching the early light through the open door beside my truck. The house sat back from the road on a half-acre lot: a low ranch, a covered porch, a spread of pecan throwing morning shade across the flagstone. I'd bought the place eight years ago for the garage space and the quiet, and those two things had been enough.
She stood in the drive, taking it in.
"This is very you," she said.
"What does that mean, exactly?"
"One tree, one door, no decorations." She studied it. "Everything exactly where it belongs."
"Don't need decorations."
She walked up to the porch and waited.
I opened the door and she went through into the main room. It took her about four seconds to account for the space: the beat-up leather couch, a ceiling fan turning slow overhead, a worktable with maps spread across it, the gun safe in the corner, the bookshelf stacked with manuals, the kitchen to the right. Then the hall, and the door at the far end left open, the spare room visible from where I stood, bed made tight, the same as the day I'd moved in.
She looked at it. "Who uses that room?"
"Nobody ever does."
A beat. She looked at me.
"Nobody ever has," I said.
She turned back to the main room. Her eyes went to the mantle.
I'd put the photo there the first day and hadn't moved it since: Gran at the kitchen table she'd had her whole life, laughing at whoever was behind the camera. The only thing on the mantle worth putting there.
Whitley stood in front of it.
"She looks like someone who was never wrong twice," she said.
"She wasn't." I crossed to the kitchen and started the coffee. "Mostly about whether you'd shown up on time and whether you'd eaten."
"The important things, in order."
"She would've liked you for saying that."
Whitley did the wound care at the kitchen table while the coffee ran. I sat and she came around behind me with the kit, same sure hands she'd been using since Room 407. Eight days out, the incision nearly healed over. Her fingers were sure and light.
"It's looking good," she said.
"I keep saying."
"And I keep confirming." She pressed the new dressing edges down and ran her thumb along the tape to seal it. And then she didn't step back.
She stayed right there behind me, her hands still resting at my side, and the kitchen went quiet except for the coffee finishing its run and the early light coming flat through the window over the sink. I'd gone still before I'd decided to.
After a beat she said, quietly: "You're going to need someone to do this for another week at least."
"Is that a professional opinion?"
