Page 25 of Sting of Sin

So I took it to Wren, and Wren took it seriously, and that was how the two of us came to be lying on the floor of an empty upstairs room with the blinds cracked and a county road in the glass.

"Which one," she said. Low, even, all business.

It took me a while to find the words, because my body had already found the man and was busy trying to climb back down my own throat to get away from him. The crew was small in the lenses, far up the rise, a frame of new lumber and four or five men moving around it in the white morning light. Hammers. A radio I couldn't hear. Ordinary. So ordinary it made me doubt myself, which I have learned is its own kind of trap.

And then one of them stopped.

"Him." My voice came out paper-thin. "The one who isn't doing anything. By the truck. The still one."

Wren went quiet, and I felt her find him through the glass, and I felt her go still in the particular way she did when something landed as real.

He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was a man on a break by a truck, a half a mile off, a ball cap and work clothes and a body turned three-quarters away from us, and there was not one single thing about him a person could point at. He wasn't staring at the house. He wasn't doing a thing the other men weren't doing. He was just... still. Still in a way the others weren't, a stillness with patience in it, the stillness of a thing that has all the time in the world. And every time the lenses found his face he'd already turned, a beat ahead, like the glass and the man were on opposite ends of the same string, never furtive, never fast, just always, somehow, a quarter-turn from being seen.

"I can't get his face," Wren murmured, after a long while. "Watch. He doesn't ever quite give it to you."

"I know." My hands were shaking on the sill. "I can't either. I never could."

We lay there a long time and watched a man be careful in a way that didn't look like care at all unless you already knew to look. The other men on that crew, you could've drawn from memory after a minute, the big laugher, the kid, the one with the limp. Him, you couldn't have described to a cop if your life hung on it, and I understood, lying there with my heart going like a trapped bird, that that wasn't an accident. That was a skill. A man doesn't get that unrememberable by luck. He practices. He's spent a lifetime learning to be the part of the room your eye slides off of.

"Okay," Wren breathed. "Okay. I see it."

"You do?" It came out of me cracked, desperate, because I'd been so afraid even she would finally see lumber and lunch. "You see it? Tell me you see it, Wren, tell me I'm not—"

"I see it." She lowered the binoculars and looked at me, and her face was grim and certain and entirely unafraid to sit in the fear with me. "I don't see anything I could prove. That's the thing, Bee, and you need to hear it from me straight so it doesn't break you: there is nothing up on that rise a normal person would suspect. A quiet man on a legal job site keeping his face turned isn't a crime. It isn't even strange, to anybody who hasn't lived what we’ve lived." Her jaw set. "But I'm not anybody. And neither are you. And what you and I are looking at right now is a man who has made himself impossible to remember, parked less than a mile off the one gate that you live behind. I don't need it proved. I believe my eyes. I believe yours."

I could have wept. Instead I asked the question that had been sitting in me like a stone. "Then what do we do? If nobody'll—if there's nothing to—" I couldn't finish it.

"We do what we can do," she said. "Which right now is this. We watch him. We keep a count, when he's there, when he isn't, who comes and goes off that lot. We write nothing down where it'd be found and we tell no one who'd laugh it off, and we wait for him to make the one mistake careful men always eventually make, because they're so sure of their own quiet they get careless inside it." She picked the binoculars back up. "And the day he gives us one solid thing, one, we take it to Ashen, he'll listen.”

"Eli won't." It came out of me small and awful, the saying of it. "I love him, Wren. I figured that out three days ago, lying in his arms, that I still love him. And I can't take him this. He'll hold me. He'll tell me I'm safe. He'll do everything right and hear nothing." My eyes were burning. "How do you love a man who won't believe the one thing that might save your life?"

Wren was quiet a moment, the road in her glass, the still man in the road.

"You love him anyway," she said. "Because love and being heard aren't always the same gift, and a person can give you the one and miss the other and still be worth keeping. The men in this club would die for us. Every one of them. They just can't always listen to us, because listening means sitting in a fear they can't punch, and that's the one thing that breaks a man like that." She glanced at me, and something old and hard won moved behind it. "I learned not to need them to be both. I learned to get my believing from the women and my safety from the men and to stop being angry that I couldn't get all of it from one place. It's a lonelier way to live. But it's a way to live. You'll find it."

I looked back through the glass. He was bending to the lumber now, ordinary, a workman, just like Eli said. Picking up a board. Carrying it. A man earning a wage in the sun.

But I'd seen the still place in him, and so had Wren, and there were two of us now who knew, even if we had nothing, even if no one would hear it, even if the man I loved would smile and soothe and sleep beside me every night with the truth up the road that he refused to see.

Two of us. After years of being the only one in the world who knew anything, two was a number I could work with.

"Okay," I said, and I made my voice as steady as hers, because steady was a thing you could borrow until you grew your own. "We watch him."

"We watch him," Wren said.

And down on the rise, the still man set down his board, and stood, and turned, slow, unhurried, a man stretching his back in the morning, and for one cold second the front of him faced our window full on, the ball cap, the shadow where a face should be, and I swear on what's left of me that across all that distance and all that glass he looked right at the two women watching him from the dark of an upstairs room.

Then he bent back to his work like he hadn't.

Wren and I didn't move for a long, long time.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

FOREVER I LOVED that woman from from a distance and called it honor. Got good at it, even, the way you get good at anything that hurts, if you do it long enough. Figured I'd carry it quiet the rest of my life and never once let her feel the weight.

Then she woke up in my arms in the morning light, put her hand flat over my heart, and told me I was the reason she'd started living again. What felt like a lifetime of getting used to it came apart in about four seconds. I've been the wall my whole life, the thing people stand behind, glad it's there and not thinking past it. She didn't look at me like a wall in that moment. She looked at me with love pouring out of her eyes. A man doesn't walk that off.

So when she stood in the yard three days back and went white and pointed up the north road and told me a man was watching her—no. I didn't hear lumber. I didn't feel nothing. I felt the floor go out from under me.