Page 16 of Sting of Sin

"I thought they came for me."

"I know you did," I said. "They didn't. And the next time a car comes up that road, I'll be standing right here doing this exact same thing, every time, for as long as it takes, until the day comes you hear tires on the gravel and don't go anywhere at all in your head. We're gonna get you there."

She looked at me a long time. Then she did the thing that undid me worse than the those first words, uncurled, just a little, and reached over and took my hand in hers.

We sat like that a while, her hand in mine, the clubhouse gone careful and quiet around us, and some cold part of me sat off to one side running a sum I didn't like.

A flyer with her face on every county desk from here to the state line. A deputy who hadn't bought one word and was too good at the job to need to, who'd said we'll be in touch and meant it down to the boots. And a name I'd prayed I would never hear drawing breath again—Sutter—not burned, not buried, not a ghost on a paper we'd beaten. A living hand, reaching down out of that place, pointing the law straight up the one road on earth she was hidden at the end of.

We'd pulled her out from under that man once. I'd stood in a dark hallway ninety miles north and let myself believe we'd beaten him, that the worst thing in her life was shrinking behind glass and getting smaller every day she breathed free of it. And here he was. Patient. Polite. Working his channels. Sending men with badges to do his looking for him because he couldn't get his own hands through the gate.

The world knew her name now. It knew which gravel to drive up. And somewhere up north, a doctor who'd wanted her badly enough to move her in the dark had just learned that if he couldn't reach through this gate himself, he could send the whole county to rattle it for him.

I held her hand and I made her the promise anyway, the one I wasn't sure any man alive could keep. That I'd stand between her and all of it. Every car. Every badge. Every quiet man with her file open on his desk and her name in his mouth.

She held on. I let her. And I didn’t let go first.

CHAPTER TEN

THE CLEARER I got, the worse the nights got.

That's the thing nobody warns you about getting better. Full of Crestwood's chemistry, the dark behind the wall stayed down deep where it couldn't reach me, we had an arrangement, the dark and the drug. Now the drug was long gone and the arrangement was broken, and at night, with nothing left to look at but the inside of my own skull, the dark pressed up against the wall and I could feel the shape of it through the plaster. Not what it was. Just that it was there, and patient, and mine, and it wanted out.

And the bells were back.

For a few days, the best days I'd had since that night, they'd gone quiet. Then a county cruiser came up our road and sat at the gate with my face on a piece of paper, and the quiet broke and didn't come back. The alarm started up again, low and faceless and far off, and three days of telling myself the car was gone and I was safe had done nothing to shut it off. If anything it was louder now.

I'd wake gasping with no memory of a dream, heart going like a fist on a door, and I'd lie in Eli's bed in Eli's room and breathe the slow way the old doctor they'd brought in for me had taught me to, and wait for the gray to come into the window so I'd know I'd made it to another morning.

Eli always knew. He slept on the floor outside that door, had since the first night, and however quiet I tried to be he'd hear me wake, and his voice would come low through the gap—I'm here, Bee. You're alright. I'm right here.—until my breathing came down. He never came in. He just let me know the wall was holding.

One of those mornings the walls got to be too much and I couldn't lie there waiting for the gray, and I got up and went out. And Eli got up off the floor and came with me, because he wasn't going to let me walk out into the dark alone, and I wasn't going to ask him not to.

The House was dead quiet that early, just the dog and the cold and the sky going black to bruise to gold over a yard full of sleeping bikes. There was a porch off the side with a couple of beat-up chairs, and I took one and pulled my knees up and made myself small and watched the light start to come. Eli took the rail a little way off, the way he did, close enough, never crowding, and let the quiet be what it was.

I didn't hear her come out. She was just there, after a while, easing down into the chair on my other side. The quiet one. Dark hair, knees up like mine, a chipped mug held in both hands.

And something passed between her and Eli over the top of my head. I caught the edge of it, a look, a question in it and an answer back. Eli pushed off the rail.

"I'll be just inside," he said, low, to me. And I understood he was handing me something, even if I didn't yet know the shape of it. He went and stood in the doorway, a wide dark shape in the frame, close as he ever was, and he left the two of us the porch.

She didn't say anything for the longest time. Didn't ask was I okay, didn't tell me it'd get better, didn't do a single one of the things that make you want to crawl out of your own skin. She just sat, a careful arm's length off, and drank her coffee and watched the same sunrise, like two women being awake too early in the same cold was the most natural thing in the world.

It was the kindest thing anybody had done for me since I got out. She gave me her company and asked nothing back for it. I could've cried, except I don't.

We sat like that a long while. The gold came up over the bikes. The dog gave up on us and went to find a warm spot.

"It doesn't ask permission," she said finally. Not looking at me. Looking at the light. Her voice was low and even, worn smooth like something handled a lot. "The early waking. The not even knowing what you were dreaming. It just shows up and runs you, and there's nothing you did to call it and nothing you can do to send it off." She turned the mug in her hands. "I used to think the morning was the safe part. Then for a long time the morning was the worst part. So I started getting up ahead of it. Out here. Beat it to the punch."

I looked at her. Really looked. And I understood what I'd half-seen that first day, the way her eyes had stopped on me and held instead of sliding off polite. She wasn't being kind at me from the outside like the others, careful and bright and a little scared of me. She was telling me a map of a country because she'd lived there.

"I'm Wren," she said. "I'm Ashen's. You don't have to say anything back." She let that sit a second, her eyes still on the light. "I didn't. For a long time, I didn't say a word to anybody, couldn't, wouldn't, the difference stopped mattering. I had my reasons, same as you've got yours, and they were good ones." She turned the mug slow in her hands. "Nobody in this house knows what it is to keep that quiet but me. So I just want you to know there's one person here you don't ever have to do it with."

And maybe that was why. Because she said you don't have to. Everybody else, even Eli, even my brother, wanted my words so badly I could feel it come off them, and the wanting made the words go and hide. Wren didn't want a thing from me. She held the door open and stepped back from it.

So I walked through.

"It's getting louder," I said.