“It is bait,” Sterling said.
Burke’s grin widened. “I like it.”
Rawley wanted daily check-ins. Sterling said fine. Macon said he’d tell Carter to keep the kids closer to the house without explaining why, and said it in a tone that closed the subject socompletely I half-expected the door to slam. Cruz said he’d take the northeast corner overnight.
Sterling said, “You don’t have to do that.”
Cruz said, “I’m aware.”
Sterling looked at him. One beat. Two. Then he said, “Okay.”
Cruz nodded.
That was the whole negotiation. Just a few words, delivered with the efficiency of men who had decided that talking was mostly a waste of time when both of you already knew what the other was going to say.
The crew cleared out slowly. Burke stole the last cinnamon roll on his way to the door, holding it between two fingers like it was contraband and he was smuggling it to safety.
“If anything happens to this kitchen,” he told Caleb, completely seriously, “I am personally going to be very upset about it.”
Caleb said, “Nothing is going to happen to the kitchen.”
“Yeah, okay,” Burke said, in the tone of a man who actually believed it. Then he looked at the roll in his hand, his expression doing that thing—the shift from operational to genuine, the moment where Burke Callahan stopped performing and started meaning it.
“These are genuinely the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” he said. “I say that every time. I mean it every time.”
Caleb said, “I know.”
“Okay, good,” Burke said, and left.
Rawley paused at the door. Held Sterling’s gaze for a moment. Something passed between them—unspoken, weighty, the communication of two men who had done this long enough to have a shorthand that didn’t require words. Then he was gone, his boots heavy on the porch steps, fading toward the main house.
Jackson lingered a half-second too long at the coffeepot, refilling his mug with the focused attention of a man who was using the task as cover for something else.
Caleb touched his arm on the way past. Brief. Just contact—fingers against flannel, no words, just the particular warmth Caleb brought to everything, and Jackson’s shoulders dropped about half an inch. Not much. Enough.
Cruz waited at the door. Patient. Certain.
The bunkhouse settled. The kind of quiet that happened after something had been said and everyone had heard it, and now the work was waiting, and the waiting had its own particular weight.
Caleb started clearing plates. Sterling picked up his phone and pulled the photos back up. He’d been looking at them for ages. He was going to keep looking until he saw something new, or until the something new found us, whichever came first, and I knew this about him now.
Knew a lot of things about him now. The list kept getting longer, and I kept adding to it, and the adding had stopped feeling like reconnaissance and started feeling like something else entirely.
I leaned over Sterling’s shoulder. Close. Close enough that the warmth of him radiated through his shirt, close enough that I could smell pine soap and coffee and something that was just Sterling, the scent that lived in the bunkhouse now whether he meant for it to or not.
Sterling went very still. Not discomfort. We both knew what discomfort looked like on Sterling Callahan—the particular set of his jaw, the way his eyes went flat—and this wasn’t that. This was the other thing. The thing Sterling hadn’t fully named out loud yet, the thing that lived in the space between his shoulder blades when I got inside his perimeter, and the fact that he let me stay there was its own kind of confession.
I looked at the boot print photo. The diamond tread, sharp in the morning light.
“You’re going to figure out who it is,” I said.
Sterling said nothing.
“And then you’re going to handle it.”
Sterling said, still looking at the phone, “That’s the plan.”
“Good.”
