Page 88 of Breaking His Exile

That was the problem. Jax had said it without trying to convince him of anything, without needing him to agree, without the warmth that made it easy to dismiss as someone wanting to make him feel better. He’d said it the way a man said a true thing and then put it down and walked away from it.

Evander wanted to believe him.

That was what scared him. Not that Jax was wrong — but that wanting to believe it felt exactly like the certainty he’d felt on that ridge, in that mountain light, certain of his own read of the terrain while five men trusted him enough to move.

He’d been certain before.

He sat in the empty bunkhouse with the cold coffee and the dying light and Jax still across the table, waiting on nothing, asking for nothing, and he turned it over and couldn’t find the seam in it and that fact sat in him like a stone he didn’t know yet whether to carry or set down.

twenty-four

The lyric wouldn’t come.

Rainey stared at the blank line in her notebook and resisted the urge to tear the page out and start over. She’d already started over. Three times. The opening line sat there empty because the song had changed on her sometime between the cabin and this porch, and the words she’d built around the original idea now felt like furniture in the wrong room.

Past the last good road, past where the signal dies.

That was the premise. A cabin in the pines where the dark comes down hard. Nobody knows my name out here. Nobody knows yours.

Except now somebody did.

She set the guitar on the porch boards beside her and propped the notebook on her knee. Tilly lay at her feet, head on paws, watching the yard with the steady attention of a dog who believed her job description included every moving object within two hundred yards. The morning had that clean Montana light to it — sharp-edged and clear, the kind that made everything look both more real and slightly unreal at the same time.

She’d been out here since seven. The ranch was already moving — men in the barn, boots across gravel, the distant sound of Jonah’s voice directing someone through a chore she couldn’t quite make out. She’d slept badly. The guest room bed was too soft after a week on a mountain floor, and her body had apparently decided that safety meant vigilance, which meant she’d woken at every creak and footfall until dawn.

The song was the problem. The song was supposed to be about disappearing. About finding somewhere so far from expectation that expectation couldn’t reach you. Somewhere nobody knew your name, nobody knew your history, nobody looked at you and saw the sum of every bad choice you’d ever made or every bad thing that had ever been done to you.

Somewhere you could be nobody.

She wasn’t nobody on that mountain. Evander had looked at her and seen exactly who she was, and he’d stayed anyway. He’d stayed when she was angry, when she was scared, when she’d dressed a stab wound in the dark with hands that shook. He’d stayed when the fever took him and when the gunfire started and when the choices got hard. He hadn’t made her small. He’d made her necessary.

That wasn’t the song she’d set out to write.

She pressed the pen against the paper hard enough to dent it.

“Coffee.”

She looked up. Evander stood at the bottom of the porch steps with two mugs, his dark hair tied back, the bruise along his jaw faded to yellow at the edges. He’d dressed in the clothes Boone had brought him — jeans that sat loose on his hips, a gray Henley that might have been Jonah’s, boots she recognized as his own. His left arm was still tucked close to his ribs.

“Nessie’s orders,” he said.

She took the mug. The coffee was perfect — dark, clean, nothing like the bitter camp-brewed stuff they’d survived on. She drank half of it before she remembered to say thank you.

He sat on the step below hers, his back to the rail post, and held his own coffee between his palms. The morning light caught the line of his shoulders and the quiet watchfulness in his posture. He didn’t ask what she was working on. He never asked. He waited, which was worse, because waiting meant he’d already decided he wanted to know and was prepared to outlast her reluctance.

She set the mug down and picked up the guitar. Played the opening progression — the one she’d worked out in her head while watching him sharpen a knife, the one that had arrived whole and refused to leave. Past the last good road. Past where the signal dies.

She stopped. “The opening line doesn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a lie.” She set the guitar down harder than she meant to. “The song was supposed to be about disappearing. Finding somewhere nobody expected anything from you. Somewhere you could just stop being whatever everyone else decided you were.” She looked at the mountains beyond the fence line. His mountains. “That’s not what happened.”

He was quiet. Then his gaze dropped to the notebook in her lap, to the empty line, and he said, “You’re still writing about me?”

She almost laughed. Almost. “That depends. You planning to sue for royalties?”

He didn’t smile.