Page 32 of Faultline

I lock the front door and arm the sensor. She gathers her files from the table.

Neither of us mentions what I said about the thing I can't afford to lose, and neither of us pretends I was talking about the cemetery.

10

TOSH

The guest room bed is made when I leave it in the morning. I've been making it every day since I moved in, hospital corners pulled tight the way my mother taught me before she stopped being the kind of woman who taught her daughter anything useful. The habit survived the woman who instilled it, and every morning the white sheets stretch flat across the mattress in a room I sleep in less and less convincingly.

Liam is already in the kitchen. Coffee made, woodstove fed, his body positioned at the window the way it always is when I come down the hall. Feet apart, mug in one hand, eyes on the tree line. Reading the forest like a doctor reads vitals. He doesn't turn when I enter, but the set of his shoulders adjusts. He knows I'm here. His body registers me before his attention does.

"Coffee's ready," he says.

"I can tell. The kitchen smells like a fuel depot."

"You drink it."

"Not the point."

I pour a mug from the pot and take the chair at the table where my files have been living for days. The chair has become mine without anyone assigning it. The outlet beside it charges my laptop. The corner of the table closest to the window catches the best light for reading. I didn't choose these things deliberately. They accumulated, shaped by the current of living here.

The investigation has a rhythm now, and the rhythm has a shape that includes him. He walks the property in the early morning while I make calls. We compare notes over the second pot of coffee. He handles the terrain, the fences, the physical security. I handle the paper trail, the databases, the phone calls that require a voice trained to sound calm while cataloging evidence of things that aren't calm at all.

It's partnership. I've read about it. I've counseled other women on recognizing the difference between partnership and dependency. I've never had it. Its arrival in the middle of a corporate siege on a mountain in Alaska, while I'm sleeping in some hunky mountain man's guest room, is the kind of irony that would make me laugh if the stakes were lower.

Liam hasn't mentioned what he said at the window. Neither have I.

The admission lives between us the way the coffee rings live in the pine on his counter, stained into the surface and visible to anyone who looks. The cabin carries the evidence of everything we haven't discussed, and every morning I come down the hall and add to the record.

His mug goes to the left of the sink. Mine goes to the right. His boots by the front door, mine beside them, smaller and muddier because I haven't learned to navigate the drainage below the porch yet. His flannel on the hook inside the mudroom door. My jacket beside it.

A jury could convict on the domesticity alone.

The morning passes like the mornings have been passing. I call the Aurora Covenant office in Anchorage for an update on the Whitfield-Crane file. The lawyer assigned to the case is still reviewing. These things take time; the paralegal tells me.

I know they take time. I also know that Cascade's timeline doesn't wait for legal review, and every day the system processes paperwork is a day the corridor becomes more entrenched.

Liam spends the morning on the property. I hear the chainsaw start up past the first ridge, the sound carrying through the cold air with a clarity that collapses the distance between us. He's clearing deadfall along the eastern fence.

When he comes back later that morning, his hands are raw and his forearms carry the fresh scratches that spruce branches leave on exposed skin, thin red lines that will heal by tomorrow. He washes his hands at the kitchen sink without rolling his sleeves down, and the water runs brown with bark and pitch.

I watch from the table because looking away would require an act of will I'm not currently interested in performing. I know what those forearms feel like pinning me flat, and the knowledge makes the space between my thighs warm enough that I shift in the chair.

He glances over his shoulder. Catches me watching. I don't look away.

"Deadfall cleared?" I ask.

"East section. The spruce that came down in the last storm opened a sight line from the drainage to the fence."

"You closed it?"

"Dropped two birch across the gap. Won't stop anyone determined, but it slows the approach and makes noise."

He dries his hands on the towel beside the sink. His eyes stay on me for a beat longer than the conversation warrants, and the weight of his attention settles across my skin the way afternoon sun settles on exposed ground.

I can feel it. He can see that I can feel it.

Neither of us says anything about it. I pull up the next filing. The unspoken thing grows another ring in the wood.