Page 32 of Open Road

Fingers glances at Winchester, gets a nod, and stands.

“Good work,” Creed says.

Fingers pushes up his glasses. “There’s always more in the second directory.” Matter-of-fact, no ceremony, then he walks out.

As the door closes behind him, Creed stands. The others follow, chairs scrape back, the room shifting from Church’s particular stillness into the ordinary motion of men with work to do. Reaper is already thinking perimeter. Winchester is calculating the cop on payroll and how to use the ledger without blowback. Scout is thinking about whatever Scout always thinks about, which is never quite what you’d expect.

Creed stops at the door, his hand on the frame, looking back.

Not the president, the other one. The man who watched me ride away from this compound for seventeen years and never asked me to stop. Asking me to stop would have been asking me to disappear. Creed has always understood the difference between what a man needs and what you want him to need.

Jacksonville has always been more home than anywhere else. Age does things to a man’s priorities.

“There’s a room for you upstairs if you want it.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “Better than the one downstairs you’ve been using.”

His way of saying there’s a permanent space here if I want it.

The table is empty now. The laptop sits open in front of me, the spreadsheet still on the screen.

Through the kitchen door, Rose’s voice rises the way it does at the end of something she considers important. Janie’s responsecomes back, steady, dry, and warm. The voice Craig tried to take but couldn’t quite finish taking.

Something in my chest registers it before my head does, and I leave it alone.

Tonight, I tell her what she’s been carrying.

Chapter Eleven

JANIE

Rose has decided Roam is part of bedtime. There’s no negotiation on offer. She announced it from the bathroom while I was brushing her teeth. Roam has to come, with the particular authority of someone who has not yet learned that the world doesn’t reorganize itself around her preferences. The fact that the world mostly reorganizes itself around her preferences has done nothing to temper this.

“Rose, Roam is busy—”

“He’s in the hall.” She points her toothbrush at the door. “I can hear him.”

Apparently, she can hear him. Rose rinses her mouth, I dry her face, and open the bathroom door to find Roam leaning against the wall outside, his arms crossed, with the expression of a man who has heard every word through a standard interior door and is not pretending otherwise.

Rose points at him. “Bedtime.”

He looks at me over her head.

“Her words,” I say.

He pushes off the wall and follows us in.

The room Devil set us up in has one double bed. Rose immediately claimed the side nearest the window, which makes my side closest to the door. These are the rules established on night one. Mr. Rabbit lives on the pillow during the day and under the covers at night, a system Rose developed independently and enforces with full commitment. Not that bed assignments mean much in practice. Most mornings I wake up with Rose tucked against my side, Mr. Rabbit wedged between us, and barely enough room left for me.

She climbs in, burrows, and looks at Roam with enormous expectation.

He picks up Mr. Rabbit from the pillow.

Tucks him under the covers beside her, up to his ears, smoothed flat. One large hand, careful about it. Rose watches this with the solemn approval of someone whose standards are high and have been met.

Something turns over in my chest.

Craig never once did that.

Four years of marriage, one daughter, and not once did he sit on the edge of a bed and tuck a stuffed rabbit in beside her. Couldn’t be bothered. Couldn’t slow down enough. There were things more important than the particular gravity of a three-year-old watching to see if you’d get it right.