I think about whether the woman outside is going to come into the cabin.
I think about whether I should put on a different shirt.
I think about whether Max is going to come back through this door in five minutes or in an hour or at all, and the at-all is athing I let myself think for one count and then I do not let myself think it again.
I won’t lose her.
I sit on the floor and I wait.
17
MAX
The cabin door closes behind her.
I hear the lock turn.
I am at the side of my truck on a porch lit drive at eight o'clock at night with my hand still wet from the woman who has just gone inside, and the woman who put me through the academy in 2007 is standing twelve feet away at the front of her car with the headlights on me, and I have nowhere to put my hand and I have nowhere to put my face, and the only thing my body knows to do is the thing my body has always done in front of Val, which is to come to a stop and wait.
I wipe my hand on the inside of my coat pocket.
I turn.
I’ve watched her fuck enough times. She has seen me before. But this feels different. Usually I am not fucking missing women and lying to Val about it.
Val is at the front of her car.
She has not moved. The headlights are still on. The car is the dark sedan she drives when she does not want a person to see her coming. The engine is off. She is in the wool coat she wore to the meeting and the dark trousers and the boots she wears to firegrounds, and her hair is down, which I have seen Val with her hair down four times in fourteen years.
She kills the headlights.
The drive goes dark.
The porch light is the only light. The porch light is small and yellow and it falls on the boards behind me and on the front fender of the truck and on Val's face from the side. She looks tired. She looks like a woman who has driven forty miles after the day she has had to do a thing she does not want to do.
"Walk with me," she says.
"Yes, Chief."
I follow her.
She walks past the truck and past the porch and past the side of the cabin to the path that runs into the pines behind the cabin where I have a woodshed and a stack of split larch and a clearing with a chopping block in it. I have used this path twelve times since November. I have not walked it with another person in it.
She walks fifty feet into the pines.
She stops at the chopping block.
The pines close the porch light out. There is starlight at the top of the trees and there is the small moon over the ridge and there is no other light. She turns to me. I cannot see her face. I can see the shape of her against the pines.
"Hale."
"Chief."
"Sit."
I sit on the chopping block.
She does not sit. She stands in front of me with her hands in her coat pockets and her boots planted, and she lets the count go for a long beat. She is letting it go because she wants me to feel the count. I feel the count. The count is the count I have felt in her office four times in fourteen years, before she has put a thing on me that has hurt.
