She looks back with the calm certainty of someone who has thought about this already. "You get a certain face when you're scared," she says. "It looks like your regular face but quieter. Dad gets it too sometimes." She pauses. "You both have the same scared face which I think is kind of funny."
I stare at this eight-year-old sitting at my cabin table at seven-thirty on a Thursday, with slightly dark French toast and the emotional intelligence of someone four times her age.
"Maisie," I say carefully. "How are you this perceptive."
She shrugs. "I read a lot."
Despite everything I laugh. Short, real, the first one in three days that hasn't required any effort.
She smiles when she hears it. Satisfied. Like she came here with a specific goal and has achieved it.
"Will you fix it?" she asks. Quietly. Serious again.
I look at this child who knocked on my door at seven-thirty with French toast and the bravery of someone who decided love was worth showing up for regardless of whether it was comfortable.
She learned that from somewhere.
I think about where.
"Yeah," I say quietly. "I'm going to fix it."
She nods. Picks up her fork. Gestures at the plate between us. "You should eat it warm," she says. "It gets weird when it's cold."
I pick up my fork.
We eat French toast together in the warm cabin and she tells me about a book she's reading and I listen and somewhere underneath the listening I am making a decision that I should have made three days ago.
Tomorrow morning.
Porch coffee.
I'm going to fix it.
I'm on his porch at five-fifteen.
Earlier than usual. Earlier than either of us normally gets there. The ranch is still mostly dark, the hill line just starting to separate itself from the sky, the barn a quiet shape against the pre-dawn. I've been awake since four.
I stopped pretending to sleep at five, got up, made coffee, then walked across the yard before I could talk myself out of it.
Maisie said fix it.
I'm fixing it.
Beckett comes through the front door at five-twenty with his coffee and his notebook and his hat and stops when he sees me in his chair. He reads my face in the half dark with the accuracyhe's developed over three months of paying close attention and whatever he finds there makes something in his expression shift.
Not relief exactly. More like a man who has been waiting for a door to open and is being careful not to rush through it.
He sits in the other chair.
Pours from his thermos into the extra cup he brought without being asked.
Still making two, even now.
That undoes approximately thirty percent of my composure before I've said a single word and I take a breath and remind myself that I came here to say something and I'm going to say it.
"I owe you an explanation," I say.
"You don't owe me anything," he says quietly.
