Page 17 of Sting of Sin

My voice came out rough and small in the cold, and it was the first thing I'd said to a living soul who wasn't Eli or Caleb, and the sky didn't fall and the porch didn't break. Wren didn't whip around or make a fuss or call for anybody. She just nodded, slow, like I'd told her something she already knew, and kept her eyes soft on the yard so I wouldn't feel watched.

"The dark," she said. "Yeah. It gets louder before it gets quieter, when the meds go. Feels like backwards. It's not." A pause. "Mine had a face. For me it got easier once it had a face I could set it on, even when the face scared me worse. The not-knowing was the worst of it, in the end. But that's mine. Everybody's is their own."

A face.

Something in me lurched toward that and slammed into the wall so hard I felt it in my teeth, and I must have made a sound, or gone white, because Wren went still and watchful and didn't push, and waited.

And I found that with her I could give a little of it. Not the wall, not what was behind it, the wall wouldn't move. But the part out front, the part I did know: the wrongness I'd carried out of that place like a stone in my shoe. That, I could finally hand to somebody who wouldn't try to fix it before she'd even heard what it was.

"There's a feeling," I said.

The words came slow, dragged up. "I can't put a face on it. I can't even tell you what it is. But I know it." I pressed my fist flat to my chest, over the spot where it lived. "I had it once before. The day everything happened. This wrongness, right here, like an alarm going off in a room with no door, something's not right, get out, get away. I had it the whole day and I told myself I was being silly. I was happy. I had no reason for it. So I turned it off with both hands." My hands had started to shake. "And then it was night, and it was the woods, and the feeling had been right the whole entire time, and I was the one who'd put it to sleep."

I made myself keep going. "I've got it again, Wren. Not like that place, there it screamed at me, all day, every day—it's quieter here. Near my brother, near Eli, most days it almost lets me rest. But it's not gone. It's down there ringing low, and it got louder the day that car came, and it hasn't stopped since. And everybody keeps telling me I'm safe now, that it's over, that it's just the bad place still rattling around in my head." I shook my head. "Maybe they're right. But I turned this off one time, when it was trying to save my life, and I will not do it again. Not even if I can't tell a single living soul what it's warning me about."

It poured out of me cracked and ugly and too fast, and then it was out, in the cold, between us.

I braced for it. For the thing they all did. For oh sweetheart, you're safe now, it's over, that place can't reach you here, nobody's coming, shh. The soft hands. The patting. The kindness that closes the subject because the kindness can't stand to sit inside the fear with you.

Wren didn't do it.

She set her mug down on the porch boards. She turned in her chair and faced me full on for the first time, and her eyes weren't soft anymore, weren't careful. They'd gone flat and sharp and serious, the eyes of someone who'd been hunted once and never for one day forgot the feel of it.

"Okay," she said. "I believe you."

Just that. I believe you. Two words, and they went down into me deeper than four years of you're safe now ever had.

"A feeling like that isn't nothing," she said. "I learned that the worst way there is. Everybody wants you to have a reason before they'll let you be afraid, like fear's only allowed once you've filled out the paperwork on it. But the body keeps a count the head can't read. You felt this one before it had a single word to it, and it was right the whole way through."

She didn't reach to smooth it off me the way the men would have. She picked it up and let it have its weight. "They love you, so they're holding you instead of hearing you, and I know that hold." Her jaw set, and something old and bad moved behind her eyes and got put away. "I had people sure I was safe once. Holding me, telling me so. And the whole time it wasn't over, and the only reason I'm sitting on this porch is they worked that out in time. Barely." She looked at me level. "So no. I'm not gonna be one more set of hands holding you quiet while you try to tell me something's still out there."

"You believe me," I said again, stupid with it, because I needed to hear it land twice before I'd trust the floor of it.

"I believe you," Wren said, simple as that. She picked her mug back up, and her hands were steady, and that steadiness was a thing I wanted to climb inside and live in. "So here's the deal. You keep telling me. Every time it rings, every piece that shakes loose, even if it's only a feeling, even if it makes no sense and you can't put one word to it. You don't have to know what it is for me to take it serious. You just have to tell me. That's all. Deal?"

I looked at her then, really looked, and saw the thing I most needed and hadn't known to look for. Steady hands. Coffee going cold in them. Somebody of her own asleep in the House behind her. Awake too early, but here—all the way back, talking, wanting, belonging to a life. I'd thought the silence was a one-way door. She was the proof it wasn't—that there was a whole self still up ahead of me somewhere, a morning that wasn't a thing to be survived, a road another woman had already walked to the far side of and lived.

The sun was all the way up now. Somewhere inside the House a door banged and the day started moving. The dark behind the wall was still there, it's always still there, but for the first time in four years it wasn't the only thing in the room with me.

And she'd answered me like a woman with something true to say, not a broken thing to be gentled back down to sleep.

"Deal," I said.

And then, because she'd earned it and because I had it in me to give this morning, one more, a different one, just as hard to spend and worth every bit as much: "Thank you."

I looked back toward the door when I'd said it. Eli was still there in the frame where he'd stood the whole time, close as a held breath, far enough to leave it mine. He wasn't looking at us. He was looking out at the road, keeping his watch, giving me the one thing it must have cost him something to give, the sight of his girl handing a piece of herself to somebody who wasn't him, and letting her.

I got up and went back to him. Because Wren was a door I'd just learned how to open. But Eli was still the wall I put my back to. And a person coming all the way back to herself, I was starting to understand, was going to need both.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SHE'D TALKED TO Wren.

I told myself that was good. It was good. I'd have walked into a fire to get that woman to say one true thing to a living soul, and here she'd gone and done it on her own, on a cold porch, to somebody who knew the country she'd been lost in better than I ever could. A man who loves a woman right is supposed to want her well more than he wants to be the one who does it.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm that good a man. I wanted her well. I also wanted to be the door.

By evening the clubhouse had gone soft and low, most of the brothers scattered out to their own beds or their own trouble, and I found her where I usually found her when the noise died down, folded into the end of the long couch with one of the dog-eared paperbacks off my windowsill open in her lap, not reading it, just holding it. I sat down on the other end. Left the middle cushion empty, the way I always did, because the space was hers to close or not.