Page 99 of In the Dark of the Past

“You always eyeballed it.”

“I have good eyes.”

“You have overcaffeinated eyes,” she said, and came to lean against the counter beside me.

The coffee maker finished. I poured two mugs and slid one toward her.

She wrapped both hands around it and looked out the window at the pine stand. The gold was halfway down the trees now.

“It’s a nice yard,” she said.

“I keep meaning to do something with it.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something. Garden, maybe? Rand keeps telling me I should grow tomatoes.”

She glanced at me sideways. “You don’t seem like a tomato person.”

“That’s what I said. He told me I didn’t know myself.”

She almost smiled. It wasn’t a full one. There was still something careful in her expression, something that knew the morning’s calm was provisional. But it was there. Real.

We drank our coffee.

Neither of us reached for the case. It was there, the way it always was, the weight of it present in every room we’d been in for weeks. But for this hour, it was in the peripheral. Not absent, just not at the center.

“I need to call Libby,” River said after a while. “She’ll have noticed I haven’t been at home.”

“What will you tell her?”

“The truth. That I’m somewhere safer.” She paused. “She won’t ask where. I’m sure she’s already figured it out.”

“How?”

“Libby has always been able to see things like that. It’s either a gift or a problem depending on the day.”

“Today?”

“Today it’s probably a gift.” She looked down at her mug. “She’ll be relieved. She’s been worried about me being alone.”

I filed that away. Libby worried, the club was watching, and River had people in this town who were paying attention, whether or not she’d let herself rely on them.

“Good,” I said.

She looked up.

“I mean it,” I said. “I’m glad you have her. And the rest of them.”

She held my gaze for a moment, searching for something, the way she often did. It wasn’t suspicion, more like verification, the habit of a person who had learned not to assume the best until the evidence supported it.

Whatever she found, it seemed to satisfy her. She nodded once and looked back out the window.

The gold was at the bottom of the pine stand now, spilling into the yard.

I checked the time on the microwave. 7:14 a.m.

My phone was on the counter. I’d put it face-down when I came downstairs.