Page 24 of Sting of Sin

And then the alarm in me woke up and screamed.

Not the way it had been. Not the low faceless ringing I'd carried for weeks, the nameless dread with no door. This was different. This was sharp and sudden and it had a direction, and that was the thing that turned my blood to ice water, after four years of an alarm that pointed at nothing, at the whole world equally, all at once it swung and pointed at one thing, the way a compass needle finds north. Out past the gate. Up the road. The tree line where the property gave way to the scrub, and down the road.

There was a work crew up there. I'd half-noticed them before, the way you half notice scenery, trucks and a half-built frame on a rise maybe a half a mile off, men in the distance, the far-off knock of hammers that had been part of the background for days. Nothing. Scenery.

One of them had stopped working and turned to face us.

I couldn't have told you anything about him. Too far. A shape, a man-shape, standing still where the others moved, a pale smudge of a face turned our way across all that open ground. He wasn't doing anything. He was just standing, and facing us, and not working, and holding still a beat too long, a beat past anything a man glancing up from his work would do, and every single cell in my body stood up screaming at once, that, him, there, run, that's it, that's the thing, the loudest the alarm had been since the day in the woods I'd turned it off with both hands.

I made a sound. My coffee hit the gravel.

"Bee." Eli was off the wall and there in a half-second, his body angling between me and whatever I was staring at, hand light at my back. "Hey. What is it?"

"Him." I couldn't get more out at first. My hand had come up to point and was shaking too hard to. "Up there. The—the man. Watching. He's watching us, Eli, he stopped and he's—" My voice was coming apart. "It's not the past. Do you understand me? This isn't the woods, this isn't a memory, this is right now, today, that man, something is wrong, I can feel it, it's the same—it's the exact same feeling I had that day and I'm not turning it off, I'm not, please—"

He looked. I'll give him that. He put himself in front of me and he looked hard up that road, scanned the whole rise, the trucks, the frame, the scatter of men, and I watched him look and I prayed, see it, see what I see, please be the one who sees it.

"Baby." His voice had already gone soft. Already gone gentle. Already, I knew the sound of it now, gone into the shape it took when he was about to set my fear down somewhere out of my reach. "That's the crew working the Henderson lot. They've been up there going on two weeks. Framing a house. I've watched 'em haul lumber every morning."

"He stopped. He turned around and he—"

"A guy on a job looked over at the loud bikes and the pretty girl in the yard. Bee. That's all that is." He turned and got both hands gentle on my arms and ducked his head to find my eyes, and his were so kind, so sure, so absolutely certain, and that was the worst of it. "There's nobody watching you. I promise you that on my life. You're behind our gate, on our ground, with me, and there is not a soul on this earth getting near you. It's a workman, sweetheart. It's just a workman a quarter mile off having his lunch."

And there it was. The soft hands. The sweetheart. The certainty that closed the door because his certainty couldn't bear to sit inside my fear with me. The exact thing Wren had named, done by the exact man I'd let all the way in, on the exact morning after I'd decided to love him—they love you, so they're holding you instead of hearing you.

I looked up that road. The man had turned back to the frame. Just a workman, bending to his work, the way a workman would. Maybe Eli was right. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe four years of a broken alarm had finally started firing at shadows and lumber crews and any man-shape that held still too long.

Maybe.

But I'd thought maybe once before, on a gold afternoon with a familiar hand in mine, and I'd been so reasonable, so willing to be talked out of the screaming under my skin, and the screaming had been right the whole time and the reasonable had nearly killed me.

So I did the thing I was learning to do. The hardest thing. I let him gentle me on the outside, let my shoulders come down under his hands, let my breathing slow, let him think the soft voice had worked the way it always worked, because I didn't have it in me to fight the man I loved in the yard in the morning and I didn't have the words to make him hear what couldn't be proved. I let him walk me back inside with his arm around me, murmuring, there you go, I got you, nothing's gonna touch you.

But I did not turn it off.

That was mine now. He could soothe my face and my shoulders and my breath, he could talk the fear down out of my body, and I let him, because I loved him and because it cost me nothing to let him think he'd helped. But down underneath, in the place that was only mine, I kept the bell ringing. I kept the direction it had pointed. I kept the man-shape that held still too long, filed it away hard where his kindness couldn't reach in and smooth it flat. I would not do to myself what they'd taught me to do, what even love was now gently asking me to do. I would not call the alarm a liar twice.

He went off to whatever the day needed once he was sure I was settled, a kiss pressed to the top of my head, easy now, his good deed done. And I sat where he'd left me only long enough for the door to close behind him.

Then I went to find Wren.

Because there was one person in this house who, when I said a man stopped working and looked at me and every bone in my body said run, would not tell me it was lumber and lunch. Who would not need it proved. Who would set down whatever was in her hands and look at me with those flat serious eyes and say the only two words that had ever once made me feel less alone in the dark.

I believe you.

I found her in the kitchen. I waited until Jewel stepped out. And then I told her, the road, the crew, the man who stopped, the needle swinging north, the alarm that had pointed at nothing for four years pointing now at one thing like it had finally found what it had been screaming about all along.

Wren put down the dish towel.

She didn't tell me it was nothing. She didn't reach to smooth it away. She went still and serious, and she looked toward the window that faced the north road, and what she said put the first solid ground under my feet I'd felt all morning.

"Show me which crew."

***

WREN FOUND A pair of binoculars and a reason to be up on the second floor, and we didn't tell the men a word about either.

That was the new shape of things, and I felt the wrongness of it even as I climbed the stairs behind her, that I was keeping something from Eli. Three days ago I'd have said I couldn't, that there was nothing in me I'd hide from him. But three days ago I hadn't stood in the yard and handed him the truest fear I had and watched him fold it up small and gentle and put it away where it couldn't trouble either of us. It's a workman, sweetheart. He'd meant it like a gift. It had landed like a door closing. And a woman learns fast where the doors are. You don't keep bringing your fear to a man who keeps turning it into a pat on the head. You find the one person who'll look at it straight, and you take it there instead.