Page 19 of Roulette

I nodded. “The herbs look crowded.”

She glanced at the row of basil and oregano near the fence. “Yeah. Was thinking of moving them closer to the edge. Give them more sun, more air. You think?”

I sat back on my heels and considered it. The fence would provide afternoon shade, which herbs didn’t always love, but the soil looked better there -- darker, richer, less compacted. “Move the basil. Keep the oregano where it is. Basil’s pickier about drainage.”

She studied me for a beat, her head tilted slightly, and then she nodded once. “Basil it is.”

My coffee mug sat empty on the edge of the raised bed by the time we finished. I hadn’t looked toward the gate once.

By the time we stood up, my knees were stiff and my fingertips were dark with dirt, and the weed pile beside the bed was substantial enough to fill a grocery bag. Becca brushed her palms against her jeans and surveyed our work with the satisfied expression of someone who measured progress in visible results rather than promises.

* * *

By late afternoon, the day’s work had mostly wound down and the night hadn’t started yet. I sat on the top step of Roulette’s porch with dirt still under my fingernails.

Roulette came out through the screen door and leaned against the porch rail across from me, one hip braced against the wood, his arms folded over his chest. He didn’t ask what I was thinking. Not at first. He just stood there, watching the tree line go from green to gray as the light dropped, and let the quiet hold the way it always did between us.

“Back on my porch. You said one of them wasn’t fine. Didn’t push it then.”

I went still. I hadn’t expected him to bring it back up -- hadn’t expected him to have kept it, filed away somewhere behind that unreadable face, waiting for the right evening to set it down between us.

“I remember,” I said. “You didn’t ask twice.”

“Wasn’t going to make you. Asking now, if you’re ready.”

I picked at the hem of my shorts, needing somewhere to put my hands. “Second placement. I was seven.” I hadn’t meant to say it so plainly, but the words came easier here, on these steps, with the dark coming down soft instead of sudden. “The foster father there had a temper. Never hit me, not exactly. He grabbed when he was frustrated -- my arm, my shoulder, wherever was closest. Hard enough to leave marks. I was there eleven months, right before my grandmother finally got approved to take me. Learned to keep quiet and count the days until someone came to get me.”

Roulette didn’t move. I watched him take it in the way he took in everything -- no wasted reaction, no performance of outrage for my benefit -- but his jaw had gone tight, the same tightness I’d seen the day I told him about the tulips, and I understood by now that this was what his anger looked like when it had nowhere useful to go.

“He still around?” His voice was even. Too even.

“Dead. Few years back. Heart thing.” I almost smiled at the look that crossed his face -- something between relief and disappointment, like he’d been robbed of a problem he knew exactly how to solve. “You can stop doing the math. Nothing left to collect on.”

“Would’ve collected anyway,” he said, and I believed him.

“I don’t tell people that,” I said. “Not the details. It’s easier to say it was two rough years before the good part started.”

“Told you once. Don’t make it smaller than it was.”

“I know what you told me.” I looked over at him, and something in my chest had come loose, lighter than it had been a minute ago, the way it always did when a thing kept in the dark too long finally got some air on it. “This is me not making it smaller.”

He held my gaze for a long moment, and whatever he saw there seemed to settle something in him, because his shoulders eased down from where they’d crept toward his ears.

“I keep expecting to wake up and realize this isn’t where I’m supposed to be,” I said. The admission slipped free before I could second-guess it. Once it was out, I couldn’t take it back.

Roulette stayed silent for a beat. “And do you?”

I let out a slow breath and tipped my head. “No.”

The corner of his mouth lifted, barely enough to notice. He rested his forearms on his knees and looked out across the compound before speaking. “Then maybe you’ve already got your answer.”

Chapter Ten

Roulette

The war room smelled like old coffee and cigarette smoke baked into cinderblock. Single overhead light, sixty watts at most, throwing hard shadows across the scarred table that had been there longer than any of us. Fox stood at the head, arms crossed over his chest, his gray beard catching the light along the jawline. Hornet sat to my left, Gunner to my right. The materials between us: printed surveillance stills, a DMV record on thermal paper, a hand-drawn map of the neighborhood around Lark’s old rental with X’s marking sight lines and approach vectors. My kind of math.

Hornet slid a photo toward the center of the table with the tip of his index finger. The paper made a soft whisper against the wood. Gas station security camera, two blocks from Patsy’s. Time stamp in the corner: 5:47 AM, three days ago. The image was grainy, digital noise softening the edges of everything, but the subject was clear enough. Man in a gray hoodie, sitting behind the wheel of a dark blue Chevy Silverado. Parked at the far pump, facing the street, not the store. The hood was pulled up, but not so far that it concealed his face. Mid-thirties. The kind of face you’d pass on a sidewalk and not remember thirty seconds later.