Page 38 of Kid Gloves

He noticed the burn pattern in April and filed it for eight weeks. He notices everything. What else is filed.

The ice machine shudders and dumps its load like a verdict, and I'm back through the side door before the booth can turn, pie abandoned on the hall shelf like a casualty, driving home with my hands at ten and two and nothing at all behind my eyes.

The guest house. The lamp I don't turn on. The envelope on the table where the courier left it, and my own hands opening it now, smooth, steady, some other woman's hands entirely.

The paperwork's beautiful. Of course it's beautiful. Purchase price in bold, improved, obscene — a number that would've made April-me sit down on the floor. Closing in fourteen days. There's even a clause about the livestock, humane and thorough, the goats "to convey or be relocated at seller's discretion," and something about seeing Brisket reduced to a discretion finally puts a crack in the ice I've been driving around in all night. Complications resolving quickly, quietly, all of it — the investigation off my porch, the county's math starving to death, four hundred acres of scrub and memory converted into a woman nobody gets to handle again. There's a pen in the mug on the table. Gran's mug — WORLD'S OKAYEST FARMER, a gift from me, age eleven, that she used every day for twenty years like it was crystal. The universe has jokes, and they're all in my kitchen tonight.

Tank crosses the dark kitchen, toenails on the boards, and sits down on my feet with his whole warm verdict of a body. Optimist. Failed bomb school for it. Alerts on hope, cannot be convinced the package is dangerous, unsuited for work requiring suspicion. Him and me both, pal. Look where it got us.

"Don't," I tell him.

He doesn't move.

Neither do I.

Yet.

Chapter 16

Wade

Wednesday, 0640, I do the first wrong thing of the worst week of my life, and I do it with a checklist.

The lawyer's name is Marsh, out of the county seat, the best defense man inside a hundred miles, and I retain him for Delaney before my coffee's done brewing. It makes perfect sense at 0640. She's a person of interest in an arson investigation. Persons of interest need counsel before they need breakfast. I know this the way I know load ratings. So I retain Marsh, and I email Okafor's office restricting investigative access to the ranch to scheduled visits with counsel present (the facility's within my rights, it's in the contract, I wrote the contract) and I draft a statement for the insurance carrier, and I reschedule the pups' public socialization day out of an abundance of caution, and I do it all before 0800, quietly, efficiently, without asking her a single question, because that's what handling is.

I would like the record to reflect that Delaney Boone told me, in my own office, on day nine, exactly how this goes. You do the big rescue, and then it's your rules, and I'm the sad case renting a corner of someone else's life. She handed me the map to the mine and I drove out there anyway, whistling, at 0640, with a checklist.

Ray finds me at the ops desk mid-morning, reads the Marsh retainer over my shoulder, and sighs like a man watching weather come in.

"Good lawyer," he says. "Right move. And son — I know you didn't want to hear it Monday, but think again about the other piece. Distance. Not forever. Optics, just till the state clears her." He says it kind, and reasonable, and nineteen years of kind and reasonable is a current you don't feel until you're downstream. "Every photo of you two at that diner is a headline that says the contractor and the contract-holder got their stories straight. You want to protect her? Protect her from the picture."

"I'm not going anywhere, Ray."

"Course not. Didn't say go anywhere." He squeezes my shoulder, warm as ever. "Just — handle it a little cooler. For her sake."

Handle it a little cooler. For her sake. I don't take the advice. I take a half-dose of it, which is worse: I don't pull away, I just go — procedural. Cancel Thursday's rebuild walk because "the site's part of the investigation now." Move our standing dinner because Marsh wants prep time. Answer her texts a little slower, a little flatter, with the sentence "it's handled"—twice, God help me, twice in one afternoon, and never once mention the name Marsh, or the access memo, or the statement sitting in my drafts folder with her name in it, written in her voice, by me.

Every one of those calls is defensible. That's the poison in the well of a man like me. I can defend every board in a wall she's watching go up between us.

She tries twice. The record should show she tried twice. Wednesday evening she comes by the office with two plates from Loretta's, an olive branch with gravy, and I'm mid-call with the carrier's counsel and I wave her to the chair, and by the time I'm off she's left the plate and gone, and the note under the fork says WE SHOULD TALK in her block letters, and I text back "tomorrow — it's handled" like a man feeding a fire extinguisher to a campfire. Thursday morning she flags me at the kennels and gets as far as "listen, before this week eats us both—" when Marsh's number lights my phone, and I say the sentence I've said all week, one finger already rising, and something in her face goes to weather I've never seen on her, some final familiar forecast confirmed, and she says, "Sure. Handled," in a voice from a county I've never been to, and walks back to the whelping barn with her shoulders square.

I file it under she's stressed. I am a decorated observer of livestock and a catastrophist about gate latches, and I filed her under she's stressed.

Thursday, Okafor and Pruett interview me at the annex. Routine. Facility relationship, contract terms, timeline of the night of the eleventh.

Forty minutes in, Pruett apologizes, I've learned to brace when Pruett apologizes, and slides a photocopy across the table.

"Were you aware, Mr. Mercer, of the Halloran Group's purchase offer to Ms. Boone? Dated April fourteenth."

Navy letterhead. Embossed, even secondhand. Three days after the fire. I read the date twice, and the number once, and the phrase our offer remains open, and the room does a thing rooms haven't done to me since a doctor said the word cardiac about my father — it goes very far away and very loud at the same time.

"No," I say, and my voice comes out level, which is a betrayal all its own. "I wasn't aware."

"She never mentioned it? In two months. In the course of—" a delicate shuffle of pages—"a business partnership. And a personal relationship."

"Is there a question in front of me?"

There isn't. That's the worst part. They don't need one. They needed the fact walked in and left where I'd trip on it, because a man's face when he trips is evidence too, and mine gives them whatever it gives them, and Okafor watches with those steady eyes and writes something down.