He looked at me over the rim of the mug and said, “You know, you don’t actually have to do all this. House hasn’t collapsed yet and Rawley’s still got half his sight.” He set the mug down and flipped the page. “Unless there’s something on here you actually want to do. In which case, we’ll start with the top and work down.”
I didn’t answer at first. I just watched him, trying to figure out if he was serious or if this was some kind of test, a way of seeing how far I’d go to prove my own usefulness.
He watched me back, face neutral, waiting.
Emilio let out a war whoop and rolled over on his play mat, arms flailing in victory. Hooper didn’t look away from me, but the edge of his mouth twitched.
I picked up the pen and circled three items on the list—bookkeeping, supply inventory, reading contracts. Things I actually liked, things that felt like a part of me that wasn’t survival or obligation.
I pushed the notebook across the table. “These three. The rest can wait.”
He nodded, once, and closed the notebook with a flick of his hand. “Good. Because the books are a disaster and nobody’s looked at the last five vendor contracts since this spring. You can have the ledgers whenever you want. And the receipts. And the rest of the mail. If you finish before spring, I’ll buy you a pie.”
The silence that followed wasn’t awkward. It was just full, thick with all the things we weren’t saying.
Hooper wrapped both hands around his mug, elbows propped, and stared at the dark surface of the coffee. Emilio’s breathing went soft and slow, the play mat now a nap zone.
I listened to the woodstove tick, the faint groan of the house as it settled, and realized that this was what it felt like to be asked what I wanted, not what was required.
It was so unfamiliar that I had to sit with it for a minute, just to make sure it was real.
Hooper didn’t rush me. He just sat there, holding his coffee, waiting.
And for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel the need to fill the silence.
I let it be what it was.
It was the first conversation we’d had that didn’t orbit some kind of crisis. No perimeter check, no tactical briefing, no countdown to the next threat. Just the two of us in the kitchen, coffee cooling in our mugs, the baby down for his nap, the house holding its own breath for once instead of waiting for mine.
Hooper let the silence stretch, a pro move if I’d ever seen one. He watched me, not the way you study an animal to see if it’s rabid, but the way you look at a puzzle and try to find the edges first.
He said, “You ever miss Billings?”
The question landed somewhere between a jab and a handshake. I turned it over, looked for the trap, and didn’t see one.
“I miss the library,” I said after a moment. “It was heated in winter, and you could sit in the stacks for hours and nobody would ask why you weren’t in class.”
He smiled, just a little. “Did you go to class?”
“Most of them,” I said. “The ones that didn’t require group work.”
He seemed to approve of that. “What was your favorite?”
“Bookkeeping,” I said, and immediately regretted it—it sounded like the punch-line to a joke that no one else found funny.
But Hooper nodded, as if that was the expected answer. “You like balancing numbers?”
“Not exactly,” I said. I could feel the old reflexes stirring, the need to explain myself, to make it sound less weird. “I didn’t trust our estate manager. I wanted to be able to check his math.” I shrugged. “You grow up in a house like mine, you learn the numbers are the only thing that doesn’t lie.”
He grunted, a sound of recognition. “So you checked the ledgers for fun.”
I hesitated. “It wasn’t fun. It was insurance.”
He sipped his coffee, still watching. “You got any left?”
“What, ledgers?”
He shook his head. “The insurance.”
