Page 14 of Roulette

“I’m good,” I said.

He gave a single nod and settled back into his chair. I watched the line of his throat as he swallowed, and my chest shifted in a way I wasn’t ready to name. He was quiet for a while, the kind of quiet that didn’t ask to be filled. I’d stopped being afraid of those silences somewhere in the last few days, though I couldn’t have said exactly when.

“You don’t talk about before,” he said. Not a question. He was looking at the feeder, not at me, which was probably the only reason I answered at all.

“Not much to tell.” I picked at a thread of ribbon still clinging to the porch railing from some project of a previous tenant. “My mom left when I was six. Dad wasn’t around to begin with. Two years, two placements, before my grandmother got herself approved to take me. Took her that long to fight the system into letting her.” I said it the way I’d learned to say it -- flat, quick, already moving past it before anyone could decide to feel sorry for me. “She raised me the rest of the way. Good, for the most part. Better than good, some days. Then she died eight months ago, and it turned out I still didn’t know how to be alone. I’d just gotten to wait longer than most people do before I had to find that out.”

“Both of them bad?”

I glanced at him. He still hadn’t looked over, but his jaw had gone tight in the way I was starting to recognize -- not anger at me, anger for me, filed away somewhere behind that stillness for later use.

“One of them.” It did matter, more than I let on. I just wasn’t ready to hand him that part yet. “Two years isn’t long, but it’s long enough to learn how to read a room. Which door creaked. Whose footsteps meant duck and cover and whose didn’t.” I shrugged, like it cost nothing, the old reflex doing its work. “So. Not a tragic story. Just a short, ugly one, before the good part started.”

Roulette turned his mug slowly on the arm of the chair, the ceramic scraping soft against the wood. “Not nothing,” he said. “Don’t do that. Don’t make it smaller than it was.”

I hadn’t expected that. I felt it land somewhere under my ribs, unexpected and a little too warm.

“What about you?” I said, mostly to put the attention somewhere else. “Before the cut. Before Roulette.”

He was quiet long enough I thought he wouldn’t answer. “Had a mother. Good one. She died when I was nineteen.” He said it the way he said everything -- level, unadorned, no invitation for me to make a production out of it. “Didn’t have much else worth keeping after that. Found the club instead.”

“Is that why they took you in? Nobody else to answer to?”

“Something like that.” His eyes came to mine then, and there was nothing guarded in them, which was rarer than anything he could have said out loud. “Fox says a man with nothing to lose is either dangerous or useless. Said he’d rather find out which before I decided for him.”

“Which was it?”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Still finding out.”

I laughed -- a short, surprised sound -- and he almost smiled back, that same reluctant tug at the edge of his mouth I was starting to watch for without meaning to. We sat with it a moment, the two of us with our histories laid out plain on the porch boards between us, nothing dressed up, nothing smoothed over. It didn’t fix anything. It just meant that for the first time since I’d walked into this compound, someone knew the shape of what I’d carried here, and hadn’t flinched.

The cardinal came back. Landed on the feeder’s roof with a delicate tap of claws on wood, eyed the seed port with the suspicious calculation of a creature that had been fooled before, and then dropped its head to peck. Success. I didn’t move. Roulette didn’t move. We sat there in the thick afternoon heat, a man in a chair and a woman at a railing and a red bird eating seed from a tiny wooden outhouse, and for one perfect, suspended moment, nothing in the world was broken.

* * *

The feeder lid had fallen into the grass when I’d handed Roulette the empty sack. I didn’t notice until I went to screw the cap back on the feeder and realized I had nothing to cap it with. I stepped off the porch without thinking, bare feet sinking into the warm grass, and bent to retrieve it.

And stopped.

They were propped against the bottom step like someone had set them down carefully, making sure they wouldn’t fall over. Yellow tulips. Six of them, maybe seven, their stems wrapped in a strip of white satin ribbon tied in a simple knot. The petals were still tight, curved inward at the tips before fully opening, and there was no dirt on the stems -- they’d been cut clean, recently enough that the exposed ends hadn’t begun to dry or curl. Whoever had left them had chosen the flowers with care, wrapped them like a gift, and placed them where I would find them.

My hands curled at my sides. There was no note. No card. Nothing written on the ribbon. That was the message. I’m here. I can reach you. I know where you are.

The cicadas still screamed. The cardinal had vanished. The feeder swung on its wire, forgotten. I stared at the flowers until their yellow edges blurred.

Behind me, wood creaked. Roulette’s mug clicked against the arm of his chair. I heard him stand, already past surprise and into response. His boots came down the steps, one at a time, and then he was beside me, close enough I could feel the heat coming off him through my shirt.

He crouched. Didn’t touch the flowers. Examined the ribbon from about six inches away, the knot, the satin catching the light. Then he straightened and turned slowly, taking in the fence line, the tree line, the gaps between houses, the gravel lot beyond. Measured. No wasted motion.

“Go inside,” he said.

His voice was quiet and controlled, and it made my stomach drop.

I didn’t move. My feet were rooted to the grass, and my lungs had forgotten how to expand, and the yellow of those tulips was the only color in the world.

“He found me here,” I said.

The words came out exactly as they lived in my head, stripped of anything that might sound like fear because I refused to give whoever had left those flowers the satisfaction of hearing it. But Roulette heard it anyway. He heard everything.