The anger in my voice surprises me. I keep it modulated, always, the control a practice so deep it functions like instinct. But the anger about the sabotage lives closer to the surface than I allow, and Ireland's presence makes the surface thinner.
"There he is," she says quietly.
"Who?"
"The man underneath all that discipline. The one who wants to put Falk through a wall and is too controlled to let it show." Her foot presses against my palm, deliberate. "I've been wondering when he'd come out."
"He's always there."
"I know. I just wanted to hear it."
She pulls her foot from my lap, unfolds from the chair, and crosses the space between us. Her hands land on the arms of my chair and she leans down until her mouth is close to mine and her hair falls around both our faces and the world narrows to the scent of her and the look in her eyes that says she is not remotely finished with this conversation.
"Tell me about the hollow."
So I do. With her weight settled across my lap and her head against my shoulder and my arm locked across her thighs, I tell her about the hills that held the morning fog until ten. The creek behind the house that froze in January and thawed in chunksthat my sister and I threw at each other. The mine whistle at shift change, three long blasts you could hear from anywhere in the valley. The church on Sundays where my father sang bass in the choir before the coughing got too bad.
"You're a secret sentimentalist," she says against my collarbone.
"I'm an Appalachian with a memory."
"Those are the same thing, and I'm going to prove it."
I tell her about enlisting at eighteen, walking out of the hollow with a duffel bag and the certainty that my hands were meant for something the mountains couldn't give them. About BUD/S, where the cold water and the sleep deprivation refined something that was already there, a steadiness under duress that my mother put in me the night she talked a twelve-year-old through a tourniquet over a crackling phone line.
Her fingers trace slow patterns on my forearm, following the lines of tendons and veins with a precision that is never entirely absent from how she touches me.
"You're doing assessments," I say.
"I'm always doing assessments." She lifts her head and looks at me, humor layered over heat. "Your forearms are a gift to the medical profession and I refuse to apologize for noticing."
"Noted."
"If you say 'noted' one more time, I'm going back to my chair."
"Acknowledged."
"Worse."
I pull her closer, and her laugh vibrates against my chest. For a moment the investigation and the anger and the names are just the background hum underneath the present tense of this woman against me, alive and sharp and unhesitating, making me want to write poems and then abandon the notebook and put my hands on her instead.
"The notebook," she says eventually, and the word is gentle and doesn't push.
"Not tonight." The deflection is different this time. Not a wall. A threshold, held open a crack, light coming through. "But soon."
She doesn't argue. She turns her face into my neck and presses her lips against my pulse point, and the trust in that, the willingness to stand at the edge of the thing I'm not ready to show her and wait, is worth more than pushing through the door would be.
It also sends a bolt of heat down my spine that makes my hand tighten on her thigh, and she feels it and hums against my skin in a way that is not helping my commitment to finishing this conversation on the deck.
"We should go in," she says.
"We should."
Neither of us moves. The water fills the dark.
The notebook in my pocket presses against her hip, and the poem that's been forming all day sits in my mind alongside the other one, the one about this woman's mouth on my pulse and the waysoontasted when I said it, like a door opening.
The anger about the rehab center is still there, coiled, waiting for the morning. The names are still there, the operators I carry, present and permanent in the tissue of who I am.
