"There's coffee upstairs if you want some. Iron Vault rule is anybody under our roof gets fed."
"Thank you," she replies, and she looks at me again.
I come around the bench.
For eight years the promise to Danny was an abstract weight I could carry from a distance. Now she's three feet from me, and the math has changed. My body knew it the second her eyes met mine.
I cross the floor and take the bag off her shoulder. My fingers brush the strap and her shoulder under it, half a second of warmth through denim. The heat travels up my arm and reaches my chest.
She smells of white musk, faint and fresh in spite of the road.
Christ.
"Come upstairs," I tell her. "I'll get you coffee."
She nods and follows me toward the stairs. Behind her I hear Jaxson go back to the Mustang.
I take the first step without looking back. She's behind me, the bench is downstairs, and I have no fucking idea how to keep the distance without it.
Chapter 2: Callie
For all these years I have kept the letter from my brother folded in a paper envelope, sealed three weeks before he died, with one instruction across the front in his own hand:if you ever cross paths with Kane Maddox, this goes to him, Cal, and no one else.
He underlined "Kane" twice and "no one else" three times. Danny didn't mark words for emphasis. The lines were him saying more than the page could hold.
For eight years I never crossed paths with Kane Maddox.
I went to college. I lost Grandma the summer after I graduated high school. I learned to live in apartments where the heat clanked at three in the morning and the kitchen sink dripped no matter what the landlord said. I'm almost through a degree in psychology now. I've built a quiet, ordinary life out of nothing, with the letter in my bag the whole time.
Two weeks ago Kane Maddox called me.
His voice on the phone matched the man my brother had described in his letters. Six minutes of words. The road to take out of Bozeman, a name, an address, and one sentence I keepgoing back to:You need to come, Callie. There are things I would rather say to you in person.
He didn't actually have things to say to me in person, and by the third sentence I understood the real shape of the call: whatever the trouble was, he could only deal with it if I was close. I came as soon as I could, because he had finally found me, and I'd been waiting eight years to be found.
This afternoon I drove the last hour through pine forest and a town I had never seen, parked in front of his garage, and walked through the side door. He was waiting inside. The man on the other end of that phone call has long dark hair tied up at the crown, a full dark beard, and tattoos that climb the side of his neck out of the collar of his coveralls. He fills the back of the shop and makes the room feel smaller. Heat moves up my throat and into my face. I forget what I am about to say or ask. My brother warned me his eyes could end a room. Nobody warned me what they would start in me, or how quickly, or how far below the belt.
Now he's at the coffee maker on the bar cart at the top of the mezzanine, and I'm by the railing looking down at the bays where Jaxson has gone back to work and the welder has lowered his mask. The bag is on the dark leather couch where Kane set it down.
"Black?" he asks.
I turn. "With cream if you have it."
"There's cream."
He pours two mugs and brings me one, careful enough that our fingers don't touch when he hands it over. He's keeping his distance from me on purpose. He stands four feet away with his mug between his hands, but he can't take his eyes off me.
I open my mouth and close it again, because he called me and the first words should be his. So I wait, but he doesn't fill the silence.
"So... why am I here, Kane?"
A door opens behind me before he can answer, and a voice that hasn't finished cracking says, "Oh, sorry, I thought Bear was up here. Oh, hi, hi, sorry... heh, let's pretend I wasn't here."
The guy has a rag over one shoulder, a Coke in his hand, and a face he hasn't fully learned how to control. His eyes go from Kane to me to Kane again.
"Toby," Kane says.
"Yep. Going. Gone." He backs out fast and the door closes behind him.
