Her mouth curves again, a little more this time.
“That… tracks.”
I shake my head and move past her, grabbing a clean shirt from the back of the chair and pulling it on as I head toward the door.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Outside.”
The sun has lifted higher now, casting light across the field in long, clean lines. The air carries warmth beneath the cool, the kind that promises a better day even if it hasn’t fully arrived yet.
I grab the hose. Start with the plants along the side of the house. Lark lingers near the porch at first, watching, taking everything in with a focus that feels too intentional to be casual.
“You don’t stop, do you?” she asks.
“Doing what?”
“Moving.”
I glance at her, then back at the plants.
“No.”
She nods like she expected that answer.
Rook sticks close to her at first, then ventures out into the yard, his movements cautious but curious, testing the space the same way he tested me earlier.
He chases a leaf. Stops. Looks back. Returns.
It’s slow, but it’s something.
I finish watering, shut the hose off, and coil it back into place.
“We should go,” I say.
“To the inn even though you were told to wait for the marshal?”
She nods. And just like that— the quiet moment ends. The tension returns. And everything between us tightens again.
Chapter Six - Holt
The truck ride to the inn goes quieter than the one last night. I swapped the volunteer truck out for my own at the station before we made any headway toward the inn. Lark didn’t complain at all.
Morning changes things. Light gets in the way of whatever mystery darkness lends a moment. The town is awake now, people moving through it with coffee cups and errands and the false confidence that comes from a day beginning before anything has had the chance to go wrong. We pass the bakery with its OPEN sign lit in the front window, the marina already carrying the glint of sun off the water, a couple of men unloading coolers from the back of a pickup near the bait shop.
Lark watches it all through the passenger window.
Not idly.
She takes things in the way I’ve started to notice she does everything—with focus that looks almost calm until you spend another second looking at it and realize it’s something else entirely. Measurement. Assessment. A constant, low-grade need to understand her surroundings before they can surprise her.
I know that kind of attention. I wear my own version of it to work every shift. The difference is that mine gets a name people respect. Training. Awareness. Preparedness. A woman carries the same thing on her shoulders, and suddenly, people call her difficult.
I grip the wheel a little tighter and turn into the drive for Carrington House.
The place looks worse in daylight. That’s saying something, because it looked rough enough in the middle of a fire.
Morning strips away the mercy of darkness. The front of the house stands broad and weathered in the early sun, every crack in the paint and sag in the porch rail thrown into sharper relief. The broken window on the first floor glares like a missing tooth. The side yard still looks wet where we worked the fire line, patches of blackened grass cutting ugly swaths through the green.
