I went back to the range. There were more eggs to make. Sterling would eat them. He would sit at this table and drink his coffee and stay, and the staying was the thing I’d been building toward since approximately the second week, one almost-smile at a time, and the structure was sound enough to hold weight.
Mitch dropped back onto the bench. Picked up his hat from the floor and set it on the table instead of his head, which was Mitch’s version of formal attire. “For the record,” he said, “I called this.”
“You didn’t call anything,” Sterling said.
“I absolutely called this. I told Caleb, first week, I said—”
“He did say it,” I interrupted, cracking another egg. The yolk held. Wednesday good. Committed. “Word for word. It was extremely obnoxious. I have it written down somewhere.”
Sterling looked between us. His expression cycled through several distinct phases—exasperation, fondness, the bewilderment of a man who had spent twenty years building walls and was now discovering that the people on the other side of them had brought not just ladders, but blueprints.
“You’re both insufferable,” he said.
“And yet,” Mitch said, spreading his arms wide, the gesture encompassing the kitchen, the table, the three of us in it, the entire improbable architecture of whatever this had become.
Sterling picked up his coffee. Drank. Set the mug down and left his knee touching the leg of my empty chair.
He did not move it.
The stove ticked. Morning light went full gold through the east window, turning the mismatched mugs on the open shelving from warm to brilliant, and the smell of eggs and coffee and two men who stayed filled the kitchen—pine smoke and fresh grounds and the particular mineral tang of work boots that had decided, against considerable odds, that they belonged on this floor.
I stood at the range. Smiling. Not looking up. The eggs bubbled at the edges, committed to their purpose, and I flipped them one-handed and let the warmth sit in my chest where it had been building for months, patient and certain, the kind of warmth that didn’t need examining to be real.
It was real. They were real. Sterling’s knee against the empty chair, Mitch’s hat on the table instead of his head, the three of us in a kitchen that had decided, somewhere in the last four months, that we belonged in it.
I filed it. Added it to the collection. That made fifteen. Fifteen almost-smiles in four months, and the evidence was no longer circumstantial. It was conclusive.
Sterling Callahan was happy.
Actually happy.
The kind of happiness that lived in the crease beside his left eye and the set of his shoulders and the way his knee pressed against that empty chair like he was keeping a space warm for something that had already arrived.
The eggs were perfect. I knew it. He knew it. We all knew it, and the knowing was mutual and unbearable and exactly what this kitchen had become somewhere in the last four months without any of us formally agreeing to it.
I slid them onto a plate. Set it on the table. Sat on the counter. Sterling ate. Mitch ate. I drank my coffee and watched them both, and the warmth of it—Sterling, allowing himself to be happy, and not pretending he didn’t feel it—was the best thing in the collection so far.
Worth every second of the wait.
Chapter Sixteen
~ Sterling ~
The long plank table held the weight of what I was about to say better than I could. Morning light cut through the east-facing window in a clean gold line that hit my phone screen and the boot-tread photos spread beside it, turning digital evidence into something warmer than it had any right to be.
The wood stove ticked behind me. Steady. Patient. Counting seconds while I decided how many of them to waste.
Not many.
Rawley sat at the far end with his coffee, the mug dwarfed by his hands. Macon beside him, quiet, his eyes on the maps. Burke had already commandeered one of Caleb’s pastries—some kind of twisted cinnamon thing dusted with sugar—and was working through it with the focus of a man who believed dessert was a breakfast category. Jackson looked like a man running on nothing but fumes and stubbornness, dark circles under his eyes. Cruz sat at the opposite end saying absolutely nothing, which from Cruz meant he was listening harder than anyone in the room.
Mitch sat with his boots up on the bench, his thigh pressed warm against mine. He hadn’t put them there by accident. I knew the difference. His arm pressed along my side, solid heat through my flannel, and I kept my eyes on the table and my voice flat because flat was the only voice that was going to get through this without cracking something.
“Two days,” I said. “The contractors hit the northeast blind spot at 02:14. Thermal camera went dark. Four men total—two on the east tree line, two on the north access road. Diamond tread pattern.” I tapped the photo. “Same pattern we found at the cut fence Tuesday. Same pattern we’ve been tracking since the first breach three weeks ago.”
The table was quiet. Burke chewed. Caleb moved through the kitchen behind me, the soft sound of plates, and I didn’t turn around because turning around meant seeing his face and I needed the flat voice for a little longer.
“They were coordinated,” I said. “Clean approach vectors. Knew the greenhouse blocked the sight line from the main house. Knew the tree line gave cover to the river access. Knew where Cruz would be, where Jackson would be, where the motion sensors were calibrated.” I looked up. “Eleanor Peterson is in custody. Her faction is fractured and watched. Hughs is in federal holding. Neither of them is running contractors with that kind of operational knowledge.”
