Then she goes quiet.
I stand there without moving.
There is a piece of information I just received that I am not prepared to have. I am going to keep it the way she is keeping my real name. I am going to fold it into everything else I know about her. I am not going to ask her about it.
The man who was not her father.
Whoever he was, he made her who she is.
That is going to matter.
I am still standing in the hallway when I hear the front door alarm chirp.
Once. Then a second time.
I move.
I am back on the couch by the time her bedroom door opens. The coffee cup is in my hand. The window is where I am looking.
She walks past me without looking and goes to the counter. Picks up her phone. Taps it. The chirping stops.
Nadia speaks first, eyes still on the phone. "Moretti runs a perimeter sweep once a day. On every habitable structure in their territory."
"This place is in their territory."
"This place is not on their registry."
"That is not the same thing."
"No. It is not."
She puts the phone down. Walks back to the hallway. Does not look at me as she passes. The bedroom door closes behind her.
I am still on the couch.
She knew I was in the hallway.
The cabin is quiet.
4
NADIA
Iwas not asleep.
He thinks I was. Most of the things I have done in my life have depended on people thinking I was asleep. Or distracted. Or confused. Or any of the other states women are assumed to occupy when they are actually paying very close attention.
I heard him search the cabin.
Every door. Every cabinet. The closet by the front door. The hall closet. The locked back room, he could not get into without my thumb. The kitchen lamp he unscrewed and reassembled. That last one is the part I will think about later.
He planted something in the lamp.
I will find it when he is gone. He did not bug my kitchen. The people who built this place trained me to spot the kind of bugs people like him plant. He still planted one. I respect the fact that he was good enough to make me almost not respect it.
That was this morning.
The afternoon passed in three-hour pieces, pretending to sleep while a wounded cop searched my cabin. Now the light is going. It is 6:14 p.m.
