---
I leave at seven.
She walks me to the porch. She is in the henley and a pair of my sweats and bare feet. I have told her three times to put socks on and she has not put socks on. She kisses me at the door. Shekisses me the way she kissed me at the kitchen counter Tuesday night when I came in, which was the kiss of a woman who had been thinking about it all day, and the kiss this morning is the kiss of a woman who has been thinking about it all night.
"Drive safe," she says.
"Yes."
"Come home to me,” she says and I feel a tight clutch in my groin at her words.
"Yes."
"What time?”
"Six. Maybe seven."
She smiles.
"Go," she says.
I go.
I drive down the county road in the morning light. The pines are wet from the rain. The road is quiet. I drink the coffee she put in my travel cup. The cup saysRCFD Station 9on the side. She put it in my hand at the door.
I think about the kiss on the porch.
I think about it the whole forty miles. I think about it because the woman I am driving to meet is going to look at my face in the morning light and the kiss is the thing on my face this morning, and I have to put the kiss away before I get to Val's office.
I park in a lot two blocks from the building.
I sit in the truck with my hands on the wheel.
I do the thing I have been doing for three days. I put the cabin away. I put Evangeline away. I put the brass key and the bandage and the laugh away. I put the woman in my henley making me breakfast away, into a small pocket inside my chest, and I close the pocket. I sit with my hands on the wheel for ninety seconds.
I get out.
I go in.
---
Val is in the meeting room.
Kessler is there. Two people from the arson board I have seen twice. A man from the city attorney's office in a brown suit. And at the far end of the table, in a navy jacket and her hair pinned at the back of her head, Elise Warren.
I have not seen Elise Warren since November.
She looks at me when I come in. She does not smile. She does not nod. Her eyes pass over me the way her eyes pass over every body in a room, as a thing she is cataloguing for later.
I take the chair Val taps.
It is the chair to her left.
Val starts.
She runs the meeting the way she runs every meeting. She does it the way a woman runs a thing she has run for fourteen years. She walks Kessler's report. She walks the timeline. She walks the structural assessment of the east wing. She walks the medical examiner's findings on Daniel Clark. She walks the missing-persons status of Evangeline Clark. She does not look at me when she walks the missing-persons status. I do not look at her.
Elise Warren listens.
