Page 74 of Animal Tamer
“You built shelves.”
“I built shelves. And I ordered a huge bed.”
Something enormous and sweet swells up under my sternum. This man. This man, who couldn't let a person within arm's reach two weeks ago, is sitting in my passenger seat with his knees against the glovebox, commandeering my evening, moving me into four hundred square feet like it's the most obvious thing in the world.
“Everything comes,” he adds. “Your books. The avian references you keep complaining about not having. The laundry chair.”
A laugh punches out of me. “The laundry chair doesn't come. The laundry chair gets folded and put away like a civilized?—”
“The laundry chair comes.” His mouth quirks up. “It's sentient. You said so. We don't abandon family.”
I'm giggling now, actually giggling, alone in a car with the strangest, gentlest, most dangerous man in three states, and he watches me laugh like it's his favorite show under the Big Top.
I start the engine, pull out of the lot, and turn the car toward town, toward the little rental apartment with its sentient chair and its life-sized loneliness that I am about to fold into boxes and never live in again.
26
ROWE
The trailer door is six inches from my face, and I can smell the pine cleaner through the seam.
Twenty years, I've imagined this night. In dormitory bunks and truck cabs and a hundred anonymous fields, I've written it and rewritten it. The room. The man. The reckoning. I have a list behind my eyes older than the tattoos on my skin.
And I'm standing on the bottom step with sawdust still under my fingernails, and the sawdust is what my mind keeps going back to.
Because today I built the bed.
Tore out the bench where she sat that first night, the fold-down table, all of it. Framed the platform wall to wall the way Silas did his, put in twice the amount of screws just in case, hauled the mattress in with Jonah while Wren was in town saying her goodbyes to Paige. It fills the back third of my trailer now. Big enough for two people and the distance they need. Big enough for a woman to sprawl in. Tonight—for the first time in my life—I'm going tosleep next to someone. Not in a chair. Not in a sleeping bag on the floor with my spine against the cabinet. Beside her. Close enough to watch her breathe.
That's the thing making my heart slam. Not the man chained on the other side of this door.
I stand there breathing hard and wait for the hate to show up, and it comes—it always comes—but it comes tired. Like an old dog answering a whistle out of habit.
A hand lands between my shoulder blades. Logan. The only hand that gets to do that without warning, and even his stays a beat longer than usual, reading me through my shirt.
“You don't have to do any of it.” His voice is low. Behind us, the lot is dark, and Cole and Jonah are already gone, their part done, the van cooling in the equipment row. “Say the word, and I walk in there alone. I'll do the hands. I'll do all of it, brother, and I willrelishit, and you can go home and never smell pine cleaner again.”
For one second, I let myself feel how much I want that.
Then I shake my head.
“He spent twenty years being my nightmare,” I say. “I'm his destiny. He doesn't get a substitute.”
Logan studies my face in the dark. Whatever he finds there makes him nod.
“Then let's go meet him.”
I open the door, and 1999 swallows us whole.
Lemon polish. The green lamp burning on the doily table. Gospel murmuring from the radio, some choir promising mercy to people who never needed it. The cross-stitch on the wall.BE STILL AND KNOW.
And in the middle of the braided rug, chained to the bolts in the floor, kneeling because we didn't give him a chair, is Samuel Harlan.
He's smaller than my memory built him up to be. The man who filled doorways, who blotted out lamplight, who owned the dark of an entire compound, is a heavy old man in a cardigan with a gag in his mouth and his wrists locked to steel rings, and he's been crying long enough that his face is shining with tears.
He sees Logan first, and I can see the confusion, faint familiarity, a memory slipping between fingers.
But then he sees me. His eyes move over my face, and then down to my forearms, where I've rolled my sleeves to the elbow on purpose, and the scars sit raised and silver under the green lamplight. His scars. His handwriting.
