Margot puts her cup down on the table.
She looks at me for the first time since I sat down.
"Eve," she says.
"Yes."
"Whoever he is."
I do not turn my head.
"Whoever he is, Eve…”
“Um.. he is a she.” I give her the first bit of honesty I can and my eyes meet hers. She raises an eyebrow.
“She,” she says as though testing out the word.
"You do not look like a woman who has escaped from someone, you look like a woman who wants to run back home to someone.”
I do not answer.
The wind in the foothills has not changed. The sky over Boise is the colour of clean laundry. The chain is in my pocket.
I close my eyes.
I count to four.
I open them.
"No," I say. “I didn’t escape. I don’t really want to talk about it. But there is asheand I do not know what to do with missing her.”
Margot does not answer.
She puts her hand over mine on the arm of the chair, and she leaves it there, and we look out at the foothills, and the foothills do not move, and the sun comes up over the back of them, and the back of them is wheresheis.
23
MAX
The station kitchen at six in the morning is the same kitchen it has been for seventeen years.
The coffee pot is the same coffee pot. The mug with the chip on the rim is the same mug. The four rookies are at the long table eating eggs out of the pan Doyle made at five-forty. The radio on the wall is on the county channel at low. The fluorescent over the sink is the one that buzzes if you stand under it for a count of three. The board by the door has the shift roster taped to it with three pieces of blue tape, and the blue tape is the same blue tape we have used since 2019 because Val bought a roll of it that has not run out.
I stand at the coffee pot.
I pour a cup.
I drink it black at the counter.
I am not eating.
I have not eaten since the half sandwich on the bumper of the truck on Wednesday at noon, and Wednesday was three days ago, and the half sandwich was the last thing I ate that I tasted. I have put bread in my mouth at the sink at the cabin twice and I have put coffee in my mouth here three times, and the bread waspaste and the coffee is paste and my body is a paste of a body, and I am at the counter at six in the morning on Saturday in my uniform shirt with the buttons done one off at the collar, and Doyle has not pointed it out.
I look at the buttons.
I do not fix the buttons.
The four rookies do not look at me. The four rookies have not looked at me since Thursday.
