I pick up the phone. I slide it into my pocket.
I pay for the coffee.
I walk out to the truck.
I drive back to Station 9.
I have a shift to run. I have a crew to push. I have a probie to ride. I have three more conversations with Val today and a meeting at two with the arson board to prep.
I have a missing woman in my bed forty miles northwest.
I have both. I am going to have both. I do not yet know how.
I pull into the yard. I park. I take my keys out of the ignition. I sit with them in my hand a count.
The scar on my forearm hums.
I get out and I go in.
12
EVANGELINE
Iwake up alone in her bed and the cabin smells like coffee.
She has been and gone. The note on the french press saysStew in the fridge. Eggs. Bread. I'll be in by seven. M.She signed this one. TheMis small and square and held its shape when she lifted the pen. I stand at the counter in her henley and her sweats and I run my thumb along the little stem of the letter M, which she had not written yesterday, and I put the note in the pocket of the sweats.
I make coffee.
I stand at the kitchen window and I drink it and I watch a crow on the porch rail.
My body is sore in a way my body has not been sore since I was a girl learning to ride. The bottom of my stomach pulls when I lean over the sink. The inside of my thighs is tender. My wrists are faintly pink where the rope was, and my lip is a little swollen on the lower where I must have bit it, and I look at myself in the glass of the kitchen window and I do not recognize the woman in the glass. That is not a bad sentence. It is a neutral sentence about a new woman.
---
I look for the internet.
I have been a woman in a cabin for four days and a woman who will not guess at passwords, and both of those facts are still true this morning, and a third fact is new, which is that I have had the taste of Max in my mouth for ten hours and I have earned the right to know what the city is saying about me. That is the way I put it to myself. I am not sneaking. I am earning.
Her laptop is still locked.
I put the lid down.
I walk the living room again, slower this time, and I stand in front of the bookshelf. On the third shelf, behind a row of biographies, I see a slim dark rectangle I had not noticed. I take it off the shelf.
It is an old tablet.
It is not locked. It wakes with a tap. The home screen is a photograph of a porch in morning light with a pair of bare feet up on the rail. Not hers. A pair of slim female feet with a small tattoo on one ankle. The photograph is old. The date in the corner says 2019.
I feel something in my chest I don't have a word for yet.
I put it aside. It's not mine to interpret. I open the browser. The browser launches to a home page of bookmarked newsfeeds, the kind a woman who does not sleep much reads at three in the morning. National news. A fire-industry site. A long-form site. A small-town paper I don't know the name of.
The WiFi joins itself.
I type in the search bar.
I typeClark fire Redwater.
