Page 120 of Fate, Interrupted

“And?”

“Results inconclusive,” I say. “Leaning toward no.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“It’s surprising, is what it is.” I lean my head back against the seat. “I genuinely expected to be more terrified than this.”

“Are you terrified at all?”

I consider the question with the seriousness it probably deserves. “No. I actually feel relieved.”

He glances at me, one eyebrow lifting slightly. “Relieved,” he says.

“I didn’t realize how tense everything had gotten until we left it behind,” I say. “Every conversation had an edge to it. Every time someone looked at you a beat too long, I was already running through bad scenarios.”

“That tends to happen when people start smashing windows and calling it a pattern.”

“It does,” I say. “And even before that, if I’m honest. The prejudice was always there. How certain customers would pay more attention if a wolf came in, how conversations in the shop would change when they were shopping. I noticed it and filed it under ’that’s how things are.’ I stopped questioning it.” I pause. “I think I’m done not questioning it.”

“Good,” he says.

There’s no outward show of approval. Only the word, dropping into the truck cab.

The highway straightens ahead of us, and for a stretch of road we don’t say anything. The silence has the comfortable easiness of not needing to be filled. I’ve noticed this about Silas—he doesn’t treat silence as a problem to be solved. Most people do. Most people reach for words the moment the air goes still, as if silence is an accusation that needs answering.

He lets it be what it is. I wonder if that’s a coping strategy he’s developed in dealing with his father.

I think about the text to Penny sitting on her phone somewhere across the city—going out of town for a bit; I’m good, talk soon. Penny is going to have a great deal to say. She’s going to say all of it, and I’m going to let her, because she’s earned that right, and she loves me. Both of those things are true at the same time. That’s fine.

I think about Jewell, who will probably write a song about this without asking. She’ll play it for me when I come back to visit, and I’ll pretend to be annoyed when I’m not.

I think about The Last Chapter—how selling twenty books a day can mean the difference between keeping the lights on or folding. I think about the employees’ picks written on the chalkboard behind the counter, the armchairs in front of the big plate-glass window and how charming it all looks on a wintery evening.

I think about all of it, the way you hold things you love when you’re putting them down for a while—not letting go, just setting them somewhere safe.

Then I think about the man sitting three feet to my left, who packed a picnic basket and spent an afternoon on a lake reading poetry and letting me poke fun at him.

It strikes me, somewhere around mile marker forty-seven, that I trust him.

I don’t trust him with caution or conditions, but complete trust. The kind that stopped needing to prove itself.

I didn’t notice it happen.

That’s the thing about the kind of trust that’s worth having. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It drops in while you’re paying attention to something else.

My stomach growls. Loudly and with complete indifference to the emotional register of the moment.

Silas glances at me. “Hungry?”

“Apparently,” I say. “My body is replying to the conversation we were having.”

“We weren’t having a conversation.”

“I was having one internally,” I say. “Very moving. You would have liked it.”

He reaches for the GPS screen. “Forty-five minutes to Paxton.”

“That’s a long time when you’re hungry.”