His thermal is pushed to the elbow. The scar is visible from here, pale against his forearm, and I look away before he notices me looking.
"I'm not going to kill you. I'm not going to take you anywhere." He sets the coffee in front of me. "Eat something."
"I'm eating," I say — except I'm not, I'm holding the mug, and if I had any room left in my body for humor I'd find it funny. I don't have the room. It comes out flat.
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. He turns to the stove, pours the soup into the pot, waits for the flame. Puts bread on a plate. Then he leans against the counter with his arms crossed and watches the pot instead of me.
That's a courtesy. I'm more grateful for it than I know how to say.
I drink the coffee because my body just takes over. It's terrible gas station coffee. It is genuinely the best thing that has happened to my mouth in two weeks.
"Eat slow. You'll be sick if you don't."
He puts the soup in front of me, the bread beside it, the banana on the plate. He watches the window. Between bites, he asks questions that are precise, professional, aimed at the shape of something. Date of the earliest transfer? Name the Belize shell? Dev's last name? Who else at the firm knew I was looking? I answer each one as cleanly as I can, my voice coming from slightly further away than usual, the particular distance that comes after crying and before fully returning.
When he asks about Dev's girlfriend, he nods once and moves on. That small nod is the first real sign of how he works. He's not just listening. He's building something, setting everything I say alongside whatever his client told him, and somewhere in there the two versions are failing to agree. He knows it. So do I.
I finish the soup. He refills it without asking. I eat the second bowl slower, with the strange feeling that if I stop he'll notice, and it'll disappoint him, and I care about that more than I should. I file it with the other things I'm not examining right now.
When I've eaten most of the banana I put it down.
"Who hired you?"
He looks at me. "Marcius Voclain."
I already knew. I needed him to say it. "He killed Dev. Whatever he told you about me, it's a lie. He killed Dev."
He doesn't flinch, but something in the room shifts in a way I can feel — his jaw one degree tighter, his shoulders settling lower, his eyes refocusing with the look of a man who has been working the wrong problem and has just understood that. It's the first time I've seen what he looks like when he's actually thinking. It is, I will admit to no one, a very good look.
"You didn't know," I say.
"I knew the paperwork was wrong. I didn't know what right looked like until just now."
We sit with that. Outside the crow has gone quiet. The soup bowl is empty. His coffee is still on the counter where he left it, full and cold, untouched the whole time.
He straightens. "I need to make a call. Then we're leaving. Twenty minutes to pack — warm clothes, the laptop, anything you can't replace. Leave your phone on the table."
"Where are we going?"
"Higher."
"Your place?"
"A cabin. It's been in my family a long time. One road in, one gate. I locked the gate on my way down."
"Before you caught me," I say.
"I was bringing you up there either way. Just a different version of either way."
He looks at me. I look at him.
"I'm Rafe. Dannick. You should know the name of the person you're going with."
"Rafe," I say.
"Twenty minutes."
He goes out to the porch with the burner phone. I stand up from the table. My legs hold. I go upstairs to pack, taking the coffee with me, thinking about the way he said “either way” like both versions of this had always ended with me safe.
