Page 81 of The Drifter

But the older part of me, the part my mother had put her arm around on that sofa, the part that had read ten thousand strangers across a marble counter and never once been wrong about the ones who meant harm—that part was standing very still in the tall grass with its head up.

And it was saying run.

"I don't know if I can do this," I said.

It came out small.

"I don't know if I'm built for it, Clint. I've spent my whole life keeping everything safe and orderly and handled, and I finally—for the first time in my life I finally reached out and took something for myself, one thing, one man, and the thing I took has a whole war behind it that I'm not allowed to know about. And I keep thinking—" my voice went, and I let it, "—I keep thinking maybe this is exactly what I swore I'd never do. Maybe I'm the woman I've been checking in for years. Maybe I handed myself the key this time, and I'm standing in the lobby, and the doors are already closing, and I did it to myself."

He crossed the last of the space then.

He didn't grab me. He never grabs me. He put one hand along the side of my face, the way he had before he left, and he tipped it up, and he looked at me from close.

"You're not that woman," he said.

"You don't know that."

"No. I don't." He said it plain. He didn't argue it away, either, and somehow that was the only thing all morning that steadied me even a little—that he wouldn't tell me the feeling was silly. "I can't stand here and promise you how this goes. I already told you I don't make promises I can't keep. All I can tell you is what I want, and what I'll do, and then, it's yours to decide, same as it's always been yours."

"That's the problem," I said. "It doesn't feel like a decision. It feels like something already decided, and I'm just finding out about it."

He didn't have an answer for that. He just kept his hand on my face.

"I've got a bad feeling, Clint." I made myself say it, the real thing, the thing underneath all the reasonable words. "Not about you. Under you. Around you. I cannot talk myself out of it. It will not quiet down, and I don't know what a person is supposed to do about that."

The tears went over. Finally. After all the days of holding them at the edge, they went, and I let them. I cried in front of another human being for the first time since I was a girl in a linen closet.

He didn't do anything about it. That was the mercy of it. He didn't shush me or wipe them or tell me it was okay. He just kept his hand on my face and let me stand there and be a person with nothing in her hands, coming apart, seen.

"I don't know what to tell you to do about the feeling," he said, low. "I've got one, too. Had it since my first night in this town. Mine's a work thing—it's kept me alive a long time and I don't argue with it either." His thumb moved once over my cheekbone. "So, I'm not going to tell you yours is wrong. I'd never tell you that. What I'll tell you is that I'm not going anywhere you can't see me go, and I'm not going to hand you the smooth voice. If the day comes that the feeling says get clear of me—you get clear of me. No argument. No hard feelings. You listen to it. Promise me, you'll listen to it."

"That's a terrible thing to ask me to promise."

"It's the only one that matters."

And I laughed, wet and cracked, because it was the most Clint thing he could possibly have said—a man asking me to promise I'd leave him if my gut ever said to—and because the fear was still there, all of it. So was the other thing, the bigger thing, the thing I'd said and meant.

Both were true at once. The room had gotten bigger, and everything had come in—the man and the fear, the love and the woman in the car, the whole terrifying open field of a life I'd finally decided to live.

I didn't get to let in only the parts I wanted.

I put my forehead against his chest and breathed him in and stood there in the scary morning with the dread sitting in me like a stone that would not dissolve. I didn’t decide anything, and I didn’t close the door, and I didn’t run.

But I didn't set the feeling down, either. I couldn't. It stayed right where it was, quiet and certain, under everything, waiting, the way a thing waits when it knows something you don't.

24

CLINT

We stood in her kitchen a long time.

Her forehead against my chest. My hand on the back of her head. The coffee going cold on the counter behind us, and the morning going on outside the window like it hadn't heard the news.

I hunted for something to say. I did it the way I hunt everything—patient, quartering the ground—and every trail came up empty. Platitudes were the last thing she wanted. It'll be okay. I've got you. Nothing's going to happen. I'd heard men say those words in a dozen countries, and I'd watched the words be wrong more times than they were right. She didn't want soft. She wanted surety. Surety was the one thing in this world I couldn't hand her, because I don't own any. Nobody owns any. Most people just don't find that out until late.

So, I settled on the truth, and the truth was silence with my arms around it.

It's the only thing I know.