Page 2 of Sting of Sin

It made me want to put the place in the ground. I kept my hands loose in my lap and I didn't.

Throttle went to her first. Crouched down by the chair so he wasn't looming, got himself into her eyeline slow and easy the way you'd approach something that startled. "Hey, Bee," he said, and his voice did the thing it only did for her, went soft at the edges, lost all the gravel. "It's me. We're here."

She didn't answer. She never answered. But her eyes moved to him, and something in her face eased a fraction, and that was the whole victory, every week. That flicker. That fraction. Proof she was still in there.

Then her eyes moved past her brother.

To me.

I made myself hold still and let her look. That was the only thing I knew how to give her in that room, stillness, distance, the promise written in every inch of how I held my body that I would never, ever come closer than she wanted. I was a man built for breaking things. My hands had a name attached to them and the name wasn't gentle. There was exactly one thing in this world I'd never put those hands wrong on, and she was sitting three feet away looking at me like I was something other than what I was.

Like I was safe.

I didn't deserve the way she looked at me. I'd known that for years and I'd made my peace with it the way you make peace with a wound that won't close, you stop expecting it to.

"Bee," I said. Just her name. It was all I ever trusted myself with.

Her gaze stayed on me a beat longer than it stayed on most things. Then she turned back to the window.

We sat with her. Throttle talked low, about Julia, about Garrick, about the weather, about nothing, the steady stream of ordinary he brought her every week like an offering. I didn't talk much. I watched the door, old habit, and I watched her hands, and I let myself be in the same room as her for the only hour I got.

It was almost over when Reed came back.

He stood in the doorway, hands folded. "I don't want to keep you from your visit. But there's been a change to Beatrice's care plan, and you should hear it from me."

Throttle's jaw set. "What change."

"We brought in a specialist for a fresh assessment—Dr. Sutter, he consults for us." Reed said the name like it ought to mean something to us, then went on when it didn't. "His evaluation calls for a higher level of care than we can give her here. A residential program in Flagstaff, more intensive. Better suited to where Beatrice is now. As of his recommendation, her care moves under his direction."

"Says who," Throttle said. “That’s three hours from here!”

"Says the people the court appointed to make that call." Gentle. Not unkind. That was the worst of it, how kind he kept it. "I know it's hard to hear, and I'm sorry to be the one saying it. But the placement isn't the family's to decide, and it isn't really mine either. It's clinical. Dr. Sutter will be taking over her care, and the transfer's set for the end of the week." A small, sorry tilt of the head. "I wanted to tell you myself. Rather than have you drive all the way out here some morning and find an empty chair."

I felt Throttle go rigid beside me.

I felt something else, too. I felt her.

Bee had gone stone-still in her chair, stiller than still, the stillness of an animal that's heard the brush move, and her hands had locked white-knuckled in her lap, and her eyes had come off the window for the first time all visit, fixed on nothing, gone wide and glassy and somewhere far off, like one of those words had reached into her and pulled a wire.

I clocked it. I just read it the easy way, the way it asked to be read.

I thought it was the place. Thought she was scared of being moved, packed up and driven somewhere new, somewhere even farther from the only two faces she knew, and God knew that was reason enough to lock up like that.

Throttle didn't say anything else. His hand had closed to a fist on his knee, and I could feel the no coming off him like heat. It didn't matter, and that was the part we carried out of that room without understanding it yet, how little our no was worth against a piece of paper with a court's name on it.

And under the table, where nobody could see, her hand came off her lap and found the edge of my sleeve.

Just the edge. Two fingers. The lightest weight I'd ever felt in my life.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe wrong. I sat there with my best friend's sister holding onto my cuff like it was the only solid thing in the room, and I would have stayed in that chair until the building came down around us.

Reed had gone by then, slipped out the way he came, soft-shoed, his piece said. A minute later Throttle's phone buzzed against his hip, and he pulled it out and his face did the thing it only did for Julia or the kid. He muttered something about needing to take it, squeezed Bee's shoulder, and stepped out into the hall with the phone to his ear and the door easing shut behind him.

And then it was just the two of us.

I should've said something. Filled the quiet. Told her again nobody was moving her, told her we'd fight it, told her anything. But I'd learned a long time back that with Bee the quiet did more than words ever did, so I sat there and let her hold on to my cuff and waited, the way I'd wait out a storm or a standoff or anything else that couldn't be pushed.

She turned her head. Looked at me. Those blue eyes came all the way up off the floor and found mine and held them, and there was a person back there, present, awake, climbing up out of four years of gray to do something I could see was costing her everything. I watched the work of it move across her face. Like she was hauling a weight up a long rope, hand over hand, from somewhere with no bottom.