“It’s east-facing. That’s just good sense.”
“It’s Sterling-facing. That’s what it is.”
I didn’t argue. He was right, and we both knew it, and the pleasure of being known by your brother was its own kind of warmth, reliable as gravity.
The babies moved again. A rolling double shift that made me press my palm harder against the curve of my belly, feeling the pressure from the inside out.
The house was taking shape around us, stud by stud, header by header, and somewhere beyond the eastern ridge a man I loved was doing a job I understood and hated in equal measure, and the distance between those two things was measured in days and in the physical progress of the thing we were building, and neither measurement was particularly comforting.
But the warm yellow paint was real. The east-facing window was real. The counter space—all of it, every inch, non-negotiable—was real. And Mitch’s shoulder was warm against mine in a door frame that didn’t have walls yet but would, soon, and that was something. That was actually something.
I kept counting. Six weeks and four days.
The hammering overhead didn’t stop.
* * * *
The phone rang at ten-seventeen on a Tuesday morning, and I answered on the first ring because I always answered on the first ring, and Sterling’s voice came through the speaker flat and careful, the tone he used when he was delivering information he knew would land badly and had decided to deliver it anyway because that was the job.
“We got him,” he said. No greeting. Sterling didn’t do greetings on operational calls. “Mid-level. Overlooked. Had access to everything he shouldn’t have.”
I sat down on the bunkhouse couch. The cushions were still warm from where Mitch had been sitting earlier, before he’dgone out to check the south pasture fence. The wood stove ticked behind me, patient, counting.
“Peterson and the contractors have been moved to federal custody,” Sterling continued. His voice had that compressed quality, like he was reading from notes he’d written himself and wasn’t entirely happy with. “Hughs too. Treason investigation.”
Which sounded like resolution and wasn’t, because I’d been paying attention. I’d been paying attention for six weeks and four days, and I knew what came after the treason investigation.
“Your team’s been tapped to work the investigation,” I said.
A beat. Then, quieter: “Yes.”
I was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that cost something and was worth the cost. Then: “How much longer.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Ballpark.”
“Caleb.”
“I’m asking for a number, not a guarantee. I understand the difference.”
Sterling went quiet on his end. I could hear something in the background—low voices, the murmur of men in a room making decisions—and then his voice came back, lower, stripped of the operational cadence. “A few more weeks.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You don’t sound okay.”
“I’m working on it.”
Quiet again. Then, so soft I almost missed it, “I know.”
The call ended. I set the phone in my lap and stared out the window at the pasture fence. The morning light had thickened to something warmer, the kind that made the winter grass look almost gold, and beyond the fence the eastern ridge held the sky the way it always did, patient and certain and entirely unconcerned with whether Sterling was coming home.
I sat there for two hours. The phone stayed in my lap. My hands stayed where they were. The babies moved—rolling, insistent, the particular double-shift that had become their morning routine—and I didn’t move with them. I just sat and stared at the pasture fence and ran the math I’d promised myself I’d stop running.
The math where Sterling decided the mission was permanent and the ranch was optional.
The math where home was something he’d said once on a Montana road in the middle of an adrenaline crash and had since reconsidered.
