“Mm. It’s a good one.”
“Yeah.”
A long, long quiet.
The wind moves the branches. The hawks—real hawks, plain old red-tails,shrill and rudeand ordinary—call again. Just a call.Just birds.
“I’m not asking what happened,”she says softly.“I’mnot asking what they trained you to do, or what you did or what youdidn’t, or who you lost, or any of it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“Okay.”
“And if you want me to leave the porch, I’ll leave the porch.”
“Don’t.”The word comes out beforeI’veconsidered it. Hard and quick, like a man pushing back from a ledge.
“Don’t,”I say again. Softer.“Don’t leave the porch.”
“All right.”She picks up her mug and holds it in both hands.“I’m not going anywhere.”
I look at her sideways.At the ridge above her, the sky behind her, the dust of sandpaper on her cheek where she wiped sweat with the back of her hand earlier.She’sthe most ordinary, beautiful, terrifying thingI’veseen in five years.
“Six,” I say.
She looks at me, aquestion in hereyes.
“Call sign,”I say.“Six. Because I always—”I clear my throat.“I always watched everyone’s back.”
“Six,” she says softly, as if she’s been handed something precious.
“Yeah.”
“Hi, Six,” she whispers.
“Hi, Tess.”
She smiles. It’s the smallest, most undeserved thing I’ve ever received.
“Drink your coffee,”she says.“It’s getting cold.”
I drink my coffee. It’s warm, and the porch holds, and the wind comes east, and the woman on the porch step doesn’t run.
The system is gone. It crumbled into pieces around me, and I didn’t even hear it collapse.
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 howhe’sfeeling. 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 newFrenchpress,sit at my kitchen table,and make myself do nothing for an hour.
