He reads my face the way he reads everything about me now.
Something shifts in his expression. Not alarm. Just awareness.
"You okay?" he says.
"Fine," I say. "Really fine."
He hands me the coffee. I take it. We stand on the porch and I look at him over the rim of my mug and think about a notebook page with three lines and feel the permanence of something real settling in my chest exactly where it belongs.
He doesn't know I know.
I'm not going to tell him.
He deserves to do it right. I told him that the night at the piano. I meant it then. I mean it more now.
Maisie appears in the doorway with her cereal bowl and her book and looks between us with an expression that is trying very hard to be innocent.
"Dad," she says casually. "Can I talk to you about something later?"
"Sure. What about?"
She looks at me with those eyes that catch every shift in a room.
"Just a plan I've been thinking about," she says.
She goes back inside.
Beckett looks at the door. Looks at me. "Should I be worried?"
I think about the notebook. About Maisie helps in careful, deliberate handwriting.
"No," I say. "But you should be ready."
"For what?" he says.
I smile into my mug.
"Everything," I say.
Chapter twenty-three
Home
Beckett
Four months ago I drove all night from San Francisco with a daughter who wanted cowboy boots, and a ranch I wanted and had never seen in person.
I have thought about that drive a lot since arriving at Silver Mesa.
The particular quality of it, the dark highway unrolling ahead of the headlights, Maisie pretending to sleep in the passenger seat while actually watching everything out the window, the familiar hollow exhaustion of a man who has sold something he built and isn't sure yet what comes next.
I thought I was running away from something.
I was running toward something.
I just didn't know what it looked like yet.
I know now.
