Caleb hummed something low in the kitchen. I kept my head down. Worked. Let the warmth be there without explaining it away.
Forty-eight hours.
I had time.
Chapter Seventeen
~ Caleb ~
I sat at the long table with my coffee, steam rising from the chipped enamel mug, and watched the clock on Sterling’s forty-eight-hour countdown tick past the forty-hour mark without anyone mentioning it.
The pine smoke drifted from the stove in lazy curls, turning the morning light soft around the edges, and Sterling’s maps lay between us like evidence from a crime I was trying not to solve before he did.
The kitchen had been quiet for twenty minutes. Sterling’s pen moved across the paper in short, precise strokes, adding notes to a list I pretended not to read. Ink smudged his left thumb. He’d refilled the coffee carafe twice already, which for Sterling meant he was either working through something hard or pretending not to need sleep.
Both, probably.
The wood stove ticked its steady rhythm behind us, counting seconds the way it counted everything—patient, impartial, entirely unconcerned with whether the seconds were being spent well.
I drank my coffee. Let the warmth sit in my chest. Forty hours. Forty hours since he’d sat at this same table and told us someone had betrayed him, and the waiting felt like holding something delicate that you weren’t sure would survive the holding.
The truck arrived at 10:17. I heard it before I saw it—the distinctive grind of tires on gravel, the engine dropping into a lower gear as it navigated the turn toward the bunkhouse.
Sterling’s head came up. His eyes went to the window, flat green, registering the sound the way he registered everything: as data first, threat second, convenience a distant third.
Mitch appeared in the doorway wearing the particular grin of a man who had orchestrated a surprise and was about to be extremely pleased with himself.
“Delivery,” he said.
Sterling set his pen down. “What delivery?”
“The one I ordered.”
“You didn’t tell me you ordered anything.”
Mitch winked. “That’s why it’s called a surprise, sweetheart.”
Sterling’s jaw worked. The muscle in his cheek jumped once, hard, and I filed that away. Mitch’s surprises landed on Sterling’s nerves about seventy percent of the time. The other thirty percent were things Sterling needed and would never ask for, which was Mitch’s specialty and also why Sterling kept him around.
I followed them to the front room. The delivery men were already wrestling something enormous off the flatbed—a shape wrapped in weathered moving blankets, long and rectangular and clearly, objectively heavy. They grunted.
Mitch directed from the porch steps with the confidence of a man who had never lifted anything heavier than a fence post but believed in the power of verbal encouragement.
“Left a little—your other left—perfect, gentlemen, absolutely perfect.”
Sterling stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and his expression doing that complicated thing where exasperation and fondness fought to a draw. The blankets came off. The bed frame emerged—stained dark, heavy wood, the kind of craftsmanship that didn’t apologize for taking up space. A king. Obviously a king. The kind of bed that said we live here in a language Sterling had spent four months pretending not to understand.
“It’s enormous,” Sterling said.
“That’s the point,” Mitch replied.
Sterling looked at the bedroom door, then at the bed, then in the bedroom door again, with the focused precision of a man calculating angles and clearance and finding both of them insufficient. “It won’t fit through the door.”
“We can take the hinges off.”
Sterling gave a very firm, “No.”
“The hinges come off, Sterling. That’s what hinges do. They’re designed for removal. It’s their entire purpose.”
