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“You didn’t have to make breakfast.”
“We had an agreement,” she objected, shaking her head as she reached for some of the spinach, tearing it between her fingers then dropping it into the eggs.
“We had an emergency.”
“Are you hungry?” She shot back, looking over at me.
“Yeah,” I admitted.
“Then go get cleaned up, and we can have breakfast.”
We.
I didn’t think much of it right then.
But as the days would go on, that word would keep coming up.
When are we going to work on the garden?
What should we have for lunch?
How do we wash clothes?
But at the moment, it was a simple comment that didn’t even break my stride.
“Did you name him?” I’d asked after watching her feed him a bottle.
“Gadget.”
“Gadget?” I repeated, brows raising. I’d figured she’d go for something cutesy. Or a human name or some shit. Not fucking Gadget. “How’d you come up with that?”
“Your rant from earlier.”
“I don’t rant.”
“You rant,” she corrected, smile a little teasing.
“What was I ranting about?”
“You were grumbling at your phone. It must not have been cooperating. And you were saying something about gadgets. I’m almost surprised you didn’t throw in a ‘newfangled’ or something. It reminded me of my grandfather.” Hearing the words come out of her mouth, her eyes went big. “That wasn’t an insult,” she insisted. “I was really close with my grandfather. He’s actually why I was in the woods the, ah, second time you found me.”
“What?”
“I guess I was in, I don’t know, shock or something. But I didn’t realize it was gone until I was in the motel room.”
“What was gone?”
“My grandfather’s wedding ring. I always, always wear it on a chain around my neck. It’s nothing fancy. Just a silver ring, worn and even blackened with age in spots. But it has a lot of sentimental value. He and my grandmother were elementary school sweethearts. She died when they were just twenty-six. But he never looked at another woman again. He loved her and missed her every day until he passed. He left me that ring in his will saying he hoped it would bring a man like that to me one day. And it was gone,” she added, blinking tears away.
“So you went into the woods at night to find it?”
“I, um, I was still in shock, I think. It was at the motel that I started to remember some things. Not all of it. But a little bit. And I guess I wasn’t handling it well. All I could think about was getting that ring back. I mean… I don’t even know if I had it on in the woods. Or if someone… or if it was taken before. I guess I might never know.”
“You’ll know,” I assured her, tone brooking no argument. But, well, this little slip of a woman with cracks in her heart did what most of the scariest men I had ever met wouldn’t in this situation. She argued.
“Logically, I probably won’t,” she told me, shrugging one of those slight shoulders. “I won’t lie and say that doesn’t bother me, but I’m… accepting it.”
I hadn’t told her about the team, about how they were doing what they could to look into things. They weren’t investigators. There was another crew in Navesink Bank that handled that shit. And, if need be, I would reach out to Sawyer and his crew to look into it. But my team had connections. Especially now that there was a hacker on the team. And because Bellamy brought with him a very odd, very diversified list of associates who could help if he needed to reach out.
I was going to find out.
Who had done this.
Why.
And where her fucking necklace was.
Case closed.
There was no room for doubt.
There would be no accepting of impossible circumstances.
I’d figure it out.
She deserved to know.
But she didn’t need to know any of that right then.
The next morning, I woke up to her clutching Gadget to her chest under the covers like a favorite toy to a night-scared child. Captain was still nestled at her feet, keeping watch over both of them now.
And there was the warm feeling again.
The following night at dinner, I did the nearly unthinkable.
I started a conversation.
Me.
Someone who loathed small talk, who valued the silence of the world I had created.
Yep.
Me.
I broke the silence that was only punctured by the occasional scrape of a fork or bleat from Gadget.
“So, what was your old life like?”
It took a long moment for her gaze to raise, and there was a long time that I figured she was going to refuse to answer.
Not that I would blame her, of course.
I knew all about guards.
“Average, I guess,” she told me eventually, her hand absentmindedly stroking Gadget’s head where it peeked from inside his backpack. She kept him close to keep him warm, but had also made a makeshift pen earlier out of various moveable items she’d found in the cabin – wooden crates, chairs turned on their sides, a stack of cardboard boxes I had from trips into town that I never got around to bringing back to my truck.
