"Yes."
"You're afraid."
I am afraid. The fear sits behind my ribs where her head was resting a moment ago, lodged in the place her body just vacated, and it has nothing to do with Ward or the clause or the ledger on the table. It's the fear of a man who just came apart with his forehead against a woman's throat and felt, for the first time in his life, that the coming apart was the truest thing he'd ever done.
Every wall I've built since I was twelve years old and Ward told me the world would never hurt me again just fell, and the woman who knocked them down is standing in front of me with my fingerprints on her hips and the steadiest gaze I've ever had pointed at me.
"Not the word I'd use," I say.
She pulls back far enough to look at my face and studies it for a long time.
We dress in the quiet. The kitchen takes us back in stages, the lamp, the table, the journals still open where she left them. The clause sits on top of June's margin notes where I set it, the manila sleeve open, the trigger mechanism facing the ceiling. The room is the room it was before we put our hands on each other, and it isn't, and we both know it.
Greer crosses to the table. She picks up the clause and holds it in one hand. Her hair is still loose from where my fingerspulled it, and the flush hasn't fully left her chest, and the look on her face is not forgiveness, not rejection, but something harder and more specific: the look of a woman who's just confirmed what a man is capable of building and is now deciding what to demand he build next.
"You built the weapon that's pointed at me," she says. "Now unbuild it."
9
GREER
The clause is still on the dining table when I come downstairs.
It sits on top of the journals, the manila sleeve open, the trigger mechanism facing the ceiling in Callum's neat handwriting. The document built to take my mother's land, laid out beside the documentation of every other throat he cut for his family, and the man who built it walked out of my kitchen last night with his composure in ruins and a demand he didn't argue with.
Unbuild it.
My body carries last night in ways the morning light makes harder to ignore. The bruises on my hips are thumb-shaped and specific, the kind of evidence you'd photograph if this were someone else's case. The tenderness between my thighs when I take the stairs is a reminder that the man who built the weapon on my table also took his time taking me apart against a wall, and my body liked it, and my body wants it again, and my body doesn't give a damn about the manila sleeve or the margin notes or the initials C.A.
The wanting is inconvenient. It's also not going anywhere.
I pour coffee. The house is doing its October contraction, the wood tightening in the cold, the root cellar door sitting flush in its frame. Through the kitchen window the meadow is silver with frost, and the peaks above the tree line carry more white than they did yesterday.
The pantry is down to coffee, a couple of eggs, and ambition. Once again, I need food. The general store is staffed by a man who reports my grocery list to the Aldriches. The gas station is staffed by a woman who reads paperback romances and knows more about this town than anyone in it.
I pull on my jacket, pocket my phone, and drive to town.
The valley is stripping down to its bones. The aspens on the middle slopes have given up entirely, bare gray branches against dark spruce, and the road into town carries a thin skin of ice in the shadows where the sun hasn't reached. The radio mentions another pass closure, the third this month. The box gets smaller every week, and the people inside it get quieter.
Main Street is performing its usual morning: the general store open and lit, the marigolds in the window boxes still holding on with the stubbornness of flowers that don't know the season is over. Through the plate glass the grocer is restocking a shelf, and his head turns to track my car with the slow precision of a security camera on a swivel.
I park and walk toward the gas station at the far end of town. The air has the kind of cold that sits on exposed skin and stays there, and the mountains above the rooflines are so white against the blue that they look fake, a backdrop painted by someone who confused beauty with innocence.
Thayer is outside the coffee shop.
He's leaning against the doorframe with a paper cup in one hand and his phone in the other, his posture arranged for maximum approachability: one ankle crossed over the other, shoulders relaxed, his sandy hair pushed back from hisforehead. He looks up when I pass with the easy warmth of a man who has been expecting someone to walk by and is delighted that it turned out to be me.
He has the tail-wagging ease of something bred to be approachable, and I can't tell yet whether the wagging is because he's friendly or because it keeps you looking at the wrong end.
"Greer. Morning." The smile is immediate and full, reaching his eyes the way a performance reaches the back row. "How are you settling in?"
"Slowly. The house has opinions about everything."
He laughs, short and warm. "Old houses always do. My dad's place is the same. The floorboards have been arguing with the foundation since the century before last."
He pushes off the doorframe and falls into step beside me without being invited. The move is so smooth it happens before I can decide whether to allow it and refusing now would mean making a scene on a street where every window is a pair of eyes.
"You've been keeping busy," he says. His tone is easy, conversational, a man making small talk on a sidewalk. "I hear you're getting out on the trails. Smart. The north ridge is worth the climb before the snow shuts everything down."
