Page 64 of Warrior Security
“My money’s on the secret food source.” Nothing mattered more to that dog than finding any possible source of food.
“Obviously. I’m thinking of putting a camera on his kennel. Like a wildlife documentary. What does Frank do when the humans aren’t watching? We’d have a million views within a week.”
She capped the pen and moved to the next chart. Her hands were already reaching for the clipboard before she’d finished hanging the first one back.
“Also, I want to try a new enrichment rotation for the barn cats. Puzzle feeders instead of the scatter boards. Princess Whiskers destroyed the last one, obviously, because she believes physical labor is beneath her, but the rest of them actually engaged.”
I glanced over at Lark, but she was moving across the barn.
She’d been doing this for three days. Talking in schedules and plans and animal logistics, filling every pause with the next update until there was no room left for anything else. She laughed when she was supposed to laugh. She touched my arm when she walked past me in the barn. Nothing unusual.
She was performing Lark so well that anyone else would have bought it without question, but I’d stopped buying it two days ago.
Something had shifted, and the shift was in her. She changed subjects a beat too fast. Her smile showed up on time but left early. Yesterday in the kitchen, she’d reached for the junk drawer and pulled her hand back so quick she knocked her coffee mug sideways. She’d laughed that off too, but the laughter was hiding something and we both knew it.
I thought we were past her carrying things alone. She’d been letting me in, piece by piece, and I’d been learning how to hold what she handed me without trying to fix everything before she’d finished talking.
But whatever had shifted, she’d decided to go backward on that.
After morning rounds, I went to her house to fix a pantry door latch that had been sticking. Lark was in the east paddock with Duchess. I could see her through the kitchen window, leaning against the rail with her hand on the mare’s neck.
The latch needed a Phillips-head. Lark kept a screwdriver in the kitchen junk drawer. She’d mentioned it twice and both times added that she kept meaning to put it back in the toolbox.
I pulled the drawer open.
The screwdriver was there, wedged under a tangle of rubber bands and a roll of duct tape and a flashlight with a cracked lens. So was a sheet of heavy white paper with Pinnacle Property Group across the top.
I knew that name. The company that had bought her second mortgage and wouldn’t give her any slack on the late payments. The paper was thick, formal, the kind that came with language designed to end arguments before they started.
Maybe I shouldn’t have read it. But whatever it said had been stuffed in a junk drawer instead of on the counter where she left things that needed to be dealt with. Things we’d been dealing with together the past couple weeks.
I read it. Then read it again to make sure I understood.
Pinnacle Property Group was exercising the acceleration clause in the mortgage contract. The entire outstanding balance of the second mortgage was due in full within thirty days. This wasn’t the late payments. This was the whole loan. Every dollar.
And the letter was in thejunk drawer, buried, in a place nobody would look unless they needed a screwdriver Lark kept meaning to put away.
I set the letter back where I’d found it. Closed the drawer.
She’d hidden it from me for three days.
I stood in her kitchen with my hands on the counter and looked out the window. Lark was still in the paddock with Duchess, her forehead tipped against the mare’s jaw, talking to her about something. From here, she looked steady. Solid. Like a woman with forty acres under her feet and nothing pulling the ground out from under them.
I turned back to the pantry latch and had it fixed in ten minutes. I put the screwdriver back in the drawer and closed it again and went out to check the water troughs because I needed something to do with my hands while my head caught up.
Lark and I did evening rounds together. We fed the animals, checked water levels, updated charts. She made pasta and I set the table, and we sat across from each other and talked about the enrichment rotation and whether Clarence had picked up a new,particularly foul word from the farrier or if he’d come up with that one on his own.
I sat there with that mortgage info lodged in my head and smiled when she smiled and kept the conversation going and felt every second of what it cost to hold something this heavy while pretending my hands were empty.
She’d been doing this for three days. I lasted one dinner and understood exactly why she looked tired.
Lark’s breathing had gone steady an hour ago. Tova was on the floor near the door, a still shape in the shadows. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. The letter was in the next room, and the woman who’d hidden it was six inches from my shoulder.
Somewhere between the pasta and the pillow, I’d figured out why she hadn’t told me.
Me.
She hadn’t said anything about the letter because of what had happened in here.
