Page 23 of The Jackal

I'd flirted shamelessly with that man in Virginia Beach and gotten a closed door. But now, when I touched him, he'd held me like he never intended to put me down.

"Okay," I said out loud, to my empty car, at a gas station, like a lunatic. "Okay. Okay."

I pulled back onto the road and tried to drive like a person.

It was somewhere along the harbor, with the water flashing silver through the trees, that the other thing caught up with me—the thing I'd been too busy combusting to deal with. The wall. The photographs. The brass plate. DANE.

He'd walked into Dominion Hall. With those men. He'd gotten out of one of those blacked-out SUVs in that courtyard like he'd been born to it. The guards hadn't stopped him, and Claire had known his name before I'd said it.

The story I'd told myself earlier—that my Cash couldn't possibly be one of these Danes, that the man who lived out of one bag and brought me cheap takeout had nothing to do with marble and gates—came apart in my hands like wet paper.

He wasn't connected to that family. He was that family. The fortress on the wall full of disapproving soldiers was his fortress, his soldiers, his blood, and I had stood in his house before he drove up to it, run my eyes over his kin, and talked myself out of the truth because the truth was too big to hold.

Nothing about him was what I'd thought. And the part that scared me, sitting at a red light with my heart going, was that it didn't change a single thing about how much I wanted him. If anything, the not-knowing made it worse. There was a whole man under there I'd never been allowed to see. I wanted to see him so badly, it frightened me.

I called my mother. I don't entirely know why. My thumb just did it.

"Magnolia." She picked up on the second ring, brisk, between things. "I'm about to round on a post-op, you have ninety seconds. What's wrong, you sound like you ran here?"

"Nothing's wrong. I—" I laughed, and it came out wobbly. "I ran into someone. Today. From Virginia Beach."

A pause. My mother does not waste pauses. "Which someone?”

"Mom."

"Magnolia Bennett, I have delivered worse news to families than whatever you're about to dance around. Which someone?”

"Cash," I said. And then, because the name by itself wasn't enough to explain the state of me: "The one. The one I⁠—"

"The one you mooned over and pretended you didn't," my mother said. "Yes. I remember. I'm a physician, not a stone." Another pause, and her voice changed, came down a register into the careful place. "And how did that feel? Running into him."

"Like getting hit by a truck I'd been hoping would hit me."

She didn't laugh. That's how I knew she was taking it seriously. "Magnolia." A breath. "Be careful with that kind. I'm not telling you not to—God knows I'm the last person who gets to lecture anybody about wanting a man she shouldn't. I'm telling you to keep your eyes open. The quiet ones who feel like weather—they're the hardest to leave, and they almost never stay. I married one. I know exactly how good it feels right up until it doesn't."

"He asked me to dinner," I said, small.

The silence on the line that time was long enough that I checked to see if the call had dropped.

"Then wear the green," she said finally, and there was something in it, some old wistfulness I couldn't name, the sound of a woman remembering her own version of this. "And call me again when you can. I love you. I have to go."

She hung up. I drove the rest of the way to work with my whole chest aching in a direction I couldn't have pointed to on a map.

Walt took one look at me when I came through the kennel and didn't ask. He just tipped his head toward the back, and went back to his paperwork, because Walt knew the difference between a woman who needed to talk and a woman who needed a dog.

I went to Max.

He was at his gate, where he lived now, ears up. When he saw me come down the aisle, something in him brightened—not much, Max didn't do much, but a flicker, a lift. I let myself into his run and sat down on the concrete the way I had a hundred times. This time, he came to me without a negotiation. Just walked over and folded himself down against my side and put his heavy head in my lap with a sigh that went all the way through his body. I sat there with one hand on his ribs feeling his heart go, and I finally let it land.

"I did something stupid today," I told him. He didn't argue. "I let a door open. I've been standing in front of it so long, I forgot it could."

His ear twitched. Out in the yard, a dove was making its sad, warm sound.

"That's what you're so afraid of, huh," I said, smoothing the fur between his eyes the way he liked. "Letting the thing back in. Because if you let it matter again and it leaves again, you don't survive it twice." I knew what I was doing. I was talking to the dog about the dog and meaning every word about myself. Max, who'd lost the one person who was ever coming and stood at his gate for weeks refusing to believe it, leaned his whole weight into me like he understood the assignment.

Here was the thing I couldn't say to my mother and could only say to a war dog on a concrete floor: I was more afraid of how much I wanted it than I'd ever been afraid of being alone.

Alone, I knew. Alone, I was good at. Alone, nobody got to set me down slow and then drive back out of my life across an ocean to do work he'd never name.