Page 40 of The Jackal

"He's FBI, Cash," Elias said. "Deputy Director. He doesn't exactly list an address."

"Everybody's somewhere," I said. "Finding people is what I do. What we do." I looked down the table at my father, and then at all of them. "Find me where he sleeps. I'll pay him a visit, and I'll come back and tell you exactly how deep it goes. And then this room can decide what it wants to be."

Nobody spoke.

Silas smiled. Just slightly. Just once.

My anger sat in the deep water where it lives, patient, cold, and finally pointed at something.

21

MAGNOLIA

They fed me, eventually, because that's what women like these do—they let you cry yourself hollow and then they put a plate in front of you. They don't take no for an answer, because a body that's been through a war still has to eat.

I sat at the end of a kitchen island the size of a landing strip with a mug of coffee I mostly held for the warmth of it. Beans and Tiny finally lay down at my feet, wrung out from a night of terror and vigilance, two heaps of exhausted dog pressed against my ankles.

The women drifted in and out. Somebody had found me thick socks. Somebody kept the coffee hot. Joy sat with me the longest, one hand resting on the shelf of her belly, not talking much, just being a warm and steady presence at my side, which I was learning was a thing she was gifted at, the way I was gifted with frightened dogs.

I kept my phone face-up on the marble. I'd told myself it was so I wouldn't miss Dani, that I was tracking Banjo, being responsible, but the truth was, I couldn't stop looking at it. My father's name half-dialed still sat in the recent calls like a bruise. I'd promised myself I'd call him later, when I could tell it clean. Later kept not arriving.

When the phone finally lit, it was Dani.

Hey—so sorry, something blew up here this morning and I'm stuck handling it, I can't get free for a few more hours, at least. I can still run Banjo out to the foster this afternoon but it'll be later than I said. Is that okay or is the foster in a hurry?

I looked at it a long moment. And something in me, which had spent the whole gray morning being carried and fed and held and had not once been useful to a single living creature, sat up.

Because there it was. A problem I could actually solve. A thing with a clean answer, in a day that had none.

I texted her back. Don't worry about it. I'll come get him myself. Be there soon.

The second I'd sent it, something settled in my chest that had been loose and rattling since three in the morning—not the grief, the grief wasn't going anywhere, but the helplessness underneath it, the terrible passenger feeling of a woman things kept happening to.

I wasn't going to sit in a fortress and be happened to. I was going to go do the one thing left on this earth I knew how to do right. I was going to go get a dog nobody wanted and hand him to a woman who'd love him, and I was going to do it with my own two hands.

I found Cash in a hallway, coming out of a room I understood I wasn't meant to ask about. Whatever grim thing had been on his face wiped clean the second he saw me. That was a thing about him I was still getting used to—the way the hardness fell off him when his eyes landed on me, like I was the one room in his life the war wasn't allowed into.

"I need to go to the kennel," I said. "Banjo. Dani got held up and I'm not going to leave that dog sitting in a run one more day waiting. I've had enough of things that don't come when they're supposed to." My voice cracked on the end of it and I let it. "I need to do this myself, Cash. I need to do one thing today that isn't falling apart. Will you take me?"

He didn't ask if I was up to it. He didn't tell me to rest, or that it could wait, or any of the reasonable, careful things a lesser man would've said to a woman in my situation. He looked at me for a second, read whatever was written on me, and understood it the way he seemed to understand everything.

"Yeah," he said. "Let's go get the dog."

That was all. And I could have kissed him for it—for knowing that the kindest thing he could do for me right then wasn't to wrap me in a blanket, but to hand me back a piece of my own competence.

The women didn't fight me on it, which surprised me until I realized they understood it, too. Claire hugged me hard and told me to text her the second Banjo was loaded. Sloane pressed a granola bar into my hand and ordered me to eat it in the car "or I'll know." Joy just squeezed my fingers and said, "Go put the love somewhere.”

Beans and Tiny came with us. There was no version of the morning where they let me out of their sight, and no version where I made them.

Cash drove. It felt right that he should—my rough old SUV had been swallowed up into whatever machinery made things disappear around here, and he handed me up into some silent, big vehicle that probably cost more than my education. The dogs arranged themselves across the back seat, and we pulled out through the great iron gate into a morning that had no business being so ordinary and bright.

We were maybe ten minutes down the road, the marsh flashing silver on one side, when my phone rang.

Dad.

My stomach dropped. I'd been dreading it and needing it in equal measure, and now here it was, and I wasn't ready. I was never going to be readier than this, so I answered.

"Hi, Daddy."