***
She goes to bed at half past nine and thanks me from the doorway. I tell her good night. I sit by the stove for another hour after the light goes out under her door.
The bird is mostly done, small enough to fit in a palm, head turned, one wing tucked. I've made dozens of these over the years, and this is the first one that came out looking alive.
I put it down on the table next to my chair, close the knife, and watch the door at the end of the hall.
Danny's sister.
The rules are going to hold. The rules have to hold.
I watch the door until I can stop wanting it to open.
Chapter 4: Callie
By the fourth morning at Kane's house the routine has a shape: I wake before he leaves for the garage, hear the floor creak under his weight in the hall, hear the cabinet open in the kitchen and the slow drip of his coffee maker counting down. By the time I come out of my room in jeans and an old sweatshirt of mine, he has put a second mug on the counter beside his, the cream out of the fridge, the bowl of fruit from the table moved closer to the toaster. He doesn't say good morning. He nods, and the nod is enough for me.
I take my mug and a banana. He stays at the counter to drink his coffee black, looking at the window over the sink instead of at me. That's how each morning goes. He's at the garage by eight, back at six, never one minute earlier or later, and he doesn't ask what I did with the eight hours in between.
I read and I study. Toby brought my rental and my suitcase out the morning after I arrived. He left under Kane's flat stare without staying for a second cup of coffee, and I haven't called him since because I have everything I need. The textbook for my exam is open on the coffee table by eleven each morning. I make my own lunch and clean up after it. I walk the length of his property in the afternoons because I'm not allowed off it, and theproperty is bigger than my last three apartments stacked end to end, so the walking is real. He has a creek at the back of it that I have started sitting beside in the warmest part of the day.
In the evenings he comes home, we eat a simple dinner together, he sits in his chair by the stove with his piece of pine and his knife, and I sit at the far end of the couch with my book. We talk. I keep asking him the questions he doesn't want to answer.
Last night, with the textbook open on my lap and his knife working a curl off the pine, I tried again.
"Kane."
"Yeah."
"You said this is about how Danny died and that you needed me close to handle it. I've been here four days. Tell me what part of it has to do with me."
He didn't look up from the wood. "There's a piece that touches you. I'm not telling you what part tonight."
"Why not?"
"Because I haven't worked out yet how to tell you without making it harder than it has to be."
"Harder for me, or harder for you?"
That made him look up. He held the knife still for a second before he answered. "Both. Mostly you."
I didn't push him further. I can hear when he's trying to find the right words instead of dodging the question, and the difference is enough to make me let it go.
The other nights go the same. On night two I ask him if there's any danger I need to know about, and he says no. Onnight three I want to know how he and Danny met. He gives me three sentences and goes back to the wood. That's the pattern with him. He gives me a piece, then closes the door on the rest.
I keep asking because I don't know how to stop. I also know I'm not getting it before he is ready to tell me. What keeps me from making it a fight is that Danny chose him, and my brother didn't choose easily. The letter was for him. The last instruction Danny ever wrote was for me to find him. Whatever Kane is holding back, he isn't hiding it from me. He just isn't ready to put it down.
What I've started doing instead is studying him.
I study people for a living, or I will if I finish my degree. I read hands that move when they don't want you to see what their owners are thinking, weight held on one foot for too long, a true sentence that dodges the question. I'm decent at it. I was decent at it before I got grad-school-bound at twenty-one. I picked it up early. The adults in my life weren't paying attention, so I had to.
Kane gives away more than he thinks. The closed mouth that holds longer than it should, the eyes that follow me whenever I look away, the hands he keeps busy with the knife and the pine so they don't go anywhere else. But it's still not enough to put together a full picture of him. For every tell he lets slip, there are ten more he's keeping locked down.
What I can read clearly is the operational pattern of him. Every night before he turns the lamp off in the living room he walks the house: front door, back door, every window on the ground floor, the latch on the bathroom. The same route every time. I lay awake the second night and listened to it end to end, and he hasn't broken the pattern since. On the third evening he asked me to bring the list of phone numbers he'd given me the first night down to the dinner table. He wrote a seventh in pencilat the bottom and slid the page back to me.Last resort,he told me.You only call this if nobody else answers. Don't ask who it is.I didn't. I took the list back to my room and put it on the dresser with the rest of my things.
He hasn't told me what he's protecting me from, but every move he makes around me is shaped to keep me safe. I can feel that he wants me safe, and that is enough to make me trust him with the rest until he's ready to tell me himself.
By day four I'm starting to think there's more behind his distance than the situation he called me here for. I don't have the full picture yet.
