Page 35 of Dread

I’d been waiting until Ellie was in bed to tell her.

“I got another blocked call today.”

Katy turned toward me. “Same as before?”

“Same. Nobody spoke.”

I told her the rest. The blue Silverado across from the clinic. The engine running. Fox’s text. Hornet and Cotton watching the gate. The truck had last been spotted near the county line heading east, away from the compound.

“So he’s leaving?” she asked.

“We don’t know that.”

Her fingers tightened around her mug. “But he’s not here.”

“Not right now.”

I could have told her that was good news. Could have made the truck heading east mean more than it did. I wouldn’t.

“We’ll keep watching,” I said. “If anything changes, you’ll know when I do.”

Katy studied me for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

I reached over and took her free hand. This time, she held on.

“Do you think he knows we’re here? Not the compound. Here, specifically?” Her fingers tightened around mine.

I considered what I actually knew before answering. “He knows where the clinic is. We don’t have anything that says he knows where I live.”

“But he could.”

“He could.”

She looked toward the yard.

I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles. “I’m not going to tell you he can’t find us, Katy. I am telling you he won’t get near this house without someone seeing him.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“Is it working?”

“A little.”

“I’ll take a little.”

She nodded. Once. Tight. The kind of nod that wasn’t agreement so much as acknowledgment -- receiving a difficult truth without flinching, same as she received most things from me, and the courage of that nod traveled through me in a current so clean it bypassed thought entirely and went straight to whatever part of me had been holding its breath since the phone rang sometime after three-twenty.

My hand found hers on the step between us. Covered it. Her fingers were cold and I didn’t try to warm them. Just held. My thumb found the ridge of her knuckles and stayed there, not moving, present in a way that asked nothing and offered everything at once.

Beyond the porch, the compound had settled down for the night. The clubhouse sat dark in the distance, and the maples shifted along the edge of the yard. Nothing drew my attention. For tonight, that was good enough.

Katy’s head tipped against my shoulder. The heaviness of it was slight -- she was not a large woman, and the density of her had less to do with mass than with presence -- but I felt it settle against me just as I’d felt Ellie settle against my chest on the gravel drive weeks ago, complete and trusting and entirely without reservation.

We sat there. The coffee went cold in our mugs. The yellow light from the back door didn’t reach any farther than it had when we sat down, and the dark beyond it held whatever it held -- threat, or absence of threat, or the limbo that existed between those states -- and neither of us reached for our phones to check the time or the weather or the news from a world that had very little to do with the step we were sitting on.

Katy rested against me, her hand tucked into mine. Somewhere beyond the yard, Cotton had the gate. I trusted him to do his job.

Katy shifted closer, and I put my arm around her.