Page 136 of Shadow Of Sin

I sink into my chair on the porch, a deep sigh slipping through my lips. My eyes flicker toward her chair. The empty one. The way it’s been for two weeks.

I fold my fingers together, sit back, and wait.

Just like I have been for the past weeks.

The sun eventually drops behind the trees and the sky turns orange and then purple and the temperature drops. But I don’t go inside because if I go inside, I’ll start pacing again, and the pacing isn’t helping. It only makes me more anxious.

I grasp the arms of the chair and shoot up when tires crackle over the gravel on the dirt road.

My car appears out of the trees. The one she drove away from this cabin two weeks ago at 12:34 AM. She parks and turns off the engine.

She doesn’t get out right away. She sits there with her hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead. I can see her through the windshield. Her hair is down, dark waves falling around her face. Her jaw is set. She looks like a woman who drove all this way arguing with herself about whether to turn around and is still not sure she made the right call.

I don’t move from the porch. I don’t walk to the car. I don’t call out because this has to be her choice. Every step from that car to this porch has to come from her.

She won’t have it any other way.

Eva finally opens the door and gets out. I let out the breath I didn’t even realize I’d been holding as she stands there, staring at me across the driveway. I feel a little like a bug being smoked under a magnifying glass, if I’m being honest.

But I deserve it. So I’ll keep standing here, letting her singe me with those accusatory eyes. I search her face for something I can read, but her expression is locked down tight, and the fact that I can’t get a read on her right now makes my stomach drop because I can always read her.

She walks toward the porch, her steps slow. Her eyes rake over me and I watch them catalog the damage. The sling. The beard. The weight I’ve lost. Her mouth pulls into a hard line as she closes the distance between us.

“You look terrible,” she says from the bottom of the steps, her arms folded over her chest.

“I got shot.”

“That was two weeks ago.”

“Still counts.”

“You’re not eating, either.”

“I’m eating.”

“Not enough.” Her voice is sharp, but there’s something underneath the sharpness that she’s working so hard to keep buried. Something softer, and it’s enough for me to grasp onto.

I don’t push. I let her stand there on her terms.

“Can I come in?” she asks.

“You don’t have to ask.”

She walks up the steps and past me. Her scent teases my nostrils as she goes by, and every nerve in my body fires at once. I follow her inside and close the door, resisting the urge to pull her into my arms and bury my head in her sweet-smelling hair.

Eva walks around like she’s on alert. She doesn’t sit down. She moves through the cabin, eyeing everything as if she’s cataloguing any changes I’ve made since she was last here. Her fingers trail along the edge of the bookshelf until they come to one particular book. She takes The Count Of Monte Cristo off the shelf, turns it over in her hands, then slides it back into place. She runs her palm across the wood grain tabletop where we ate shitty pasta a couple of weeks ago. Then she moves toward the bedroom doorway and stands there looking at the quilt on the bed. Her shoulders tighten, her hand gripping the doorframe.

She’s trying to reconcile this place with what she found on my laptop. The disparity between the cabin where she felt safe and the cabin where everything collapsed around her. They’re one and the same, and now she’s standing in the middle of it all trying to figure out which version is real.

When she whips her head around, her eyes blaze with anger. “Talk,” she says through clenched teeth. Her fists are balled so tight, her knuckles go white. “Every single thing I found on that laptop. Explain it all. Right now to my face since you didn’t bother with bullshit excuses on my voicemail.”

I lean back against the kitchen counter, the throbbing in my shoulder making my lips twist.

“Where do you want me to start?” I ask.

She lifts an eyebrow. “The case file.”

I take a breath and nod. “Almost two years ago, your case got flagged in a routine scan I run on federal convictions in the Boston area. I run it to make sure nothing connects back to our family’s operations. Yours came up because there was a link between the company you worked for and a shell company in our financial network.”