Page 9 of The Jackal

He'd turned up the way he sometimes did at the edges of those things, watching, helping when hands were needed and disappearing when they weren't. I'd flirted. Of course, I'd flirted. I'd said something reckless about how a girl could go her whole life waiting for a man like him to make a move, and he'd looked at me for a long, dangerous second—that stillness of his, the air going tight—and I'd thought, finally, this is it, the door's going to open.

It didn't open. It never opened. What he did, instead, was take my hand. He turned it over, palm up, in both of his, and his hands were warm and rough and unhurried. I forgot how to breathe correctly. And he pressed the coin into my palm and closed my fingers over it, slow, one at a time, holding my fist shut inside his own for the length of a held note. I felt the heat come up off him. I felt the want in it—I have never in my life been more sure of anything than I was sure of the want in it. And then, he let go, and stepped back. The cold rushed into the space where he'd been, and he said, in that low, even voice, "Keep this. You earned it today."

And he walked away.

I'd stood in that parking lot holding a piece of metal where a man should have been, and I'd understood, the way you understand things in your body before your mind catches up, that this was all he was ever going to give me. Not because he didn't want me. Because he wanted me and had decided I was a door he wasn't going to walk through. Men who decide things like that, in voices that even, do not get talked out of them by a woman who flirts in parking lots.

I'd told myself the story so many times it had worn smooth as the coin. He'd chosen the work. Men chose the work. My father had chosen the work and it had cost him my mother; the whole architecture of my childhood had been built around men who loved you genuinely and left, anyway, because something with a flag on it asked them to.

Cash Dane was just one more in a long line. I'd been a fool to think being wanted was the same as being chosen.

There. I'd said his name. In my own head, in my own living room, for the first time in six months. Cash. It landed in me like a stone in a well. I waited for the splash, and the splash was just as bad as I'd been afraid it would be.

I sat there a long time with the coin in my fist, the exact way he'd left it.

Then, before the cowardly part of me could organize a defense, I picked up my phone.

He was still in there. Of course, he was. I'd never had the nerve to delete him, which tells you everything—cash dane, lowercase, the way I'd typed it years ago when he was just a contact and not a wound. One thread, ancient, a few lines about a fundraiser he'd helped me haul tables for—logistics, nothing, the kind of message you'd never read twice if it weren't his. I'd read it maybe four hundred times. I knew it the way Max knew his door.

I started typing and deleted it. Started again. Deleted that, too. Hey, stranger—God, no. I heard you might— heard from whom, I'd heard nothing. I typed something honest and frightening and erased it so fast my thumb cramped. I sat there sweating like a teenager while three enormous war dogs snored against me, and I thought about Max leaning his skull on my knee that afternoon, choosing to risk a thing his whole body told him not to risk, and I thought, well. If the dog can do it.

In the end, I kept it simple, because simple was all I could keep my hands steady for.

I'm in Charleston now, if you can believe it. New job, working dogs—the broken ones. I think about you sometimes. I hope you're well, Cash.

I read it eleven times. I took out think about you sometimes and put it back. It was true, and the truest thing in the message, and I'd be damned if I was going to send him a lie just to feel safe. I'd spent enough years being safe. Safe was a woman alone on her floor with a coin and a sock.

I sent it.

The little word went up the screen and turned to Delivered, and my heart did something violent and undignified. Then, I sat in the enormous silence of my own crooked house and waited for the three dots.

They didn't come.

I knew better. I knew you don't send a thing like that and stand over the phone like it's an oven timer. I knew the mature move was to put it down and go live my life and let the answer come or not come on its own clock. I knew all of it, and I did none of it. I sat on my living room floor and I watched a screen that stayed dark, and Delivered just sat there under my brave little message, not turning to Read, not doing anything, the most one-sided word in the English language.

My mother's three dots always came right away. My father's. The whole loud, loving, present apparatus of the people who'd decided I was worth answering—they appeared the second I reached for them, every time, so reliably, I'd stopped noticing it was a kindness.

Cash's didn't appear at all.

And I told myself the thing you tell yourself. That he was busy. That he hadn't seen it. That a man like that didn't live on his phone, that it was probably in a drawer somewhere a thousand miles from him, that the silence didn't mean what the frightened animal in my chest had already decided it meant.

I had no idea how close to true that was.

I only knew the screen stayed black.

I put the coin on the windowsill where I'd see it in the morning. I went to bed with three dogs and no answer, and I lay in the dark doing the thing I was best at in all the world.

I waited.

6

CASH

Idon't remember most of my dreams. Almost no one does. The mind puts them somewhere it won't hand you the key to, and by the time your eyes open, the whole country you just traveled has burned off like fog.

But I always keep the punchline.

I woke on the private jet with it already sitting in my chest, warm and certain, the way it always is.