Page 56 of The Reckless Rookie

Catalina

Five days, and the house learns he’s gone before I do.

My body keeps running the old program. I leave the porch light on the first two nights before I remember there’s no truck coming up the drive to need it. Wednesday I pour the second cup, hand already reaching for the pot before the front of my brain files the correction, and I stand at the counter looking at two coffees going cold and drink neither one. I’ve read a hundred grieving animals off exactly this. The body keeping a habit the mind’s already been told to quit.

I never thought I’d be the animal.

The work doesn’t care, which is the mercy and the insult both. There are stalls to muck and a fence to walk and a county that wants fourteen days of my records, so I give the county its records, boxed and tabbed and clean, because a woman with nothing to hide buries them in paper. I did what I said I’d do. I saved it. I cut the variable loose in one clean stroke, and I’ve got the empty stall and the cold second cup to show for how responsible I was.

And the hearing’s still on the calendar.

I handed Sebastian the one card that should have ended it. I removed the placement, the liability, the story. The review didn’t blink. A third letter came confirming the date, cordial as a wedding invitation.

It was never about Finn.

Finn was just the coin I happened to have on me, so I spent him, and the machine took the coin and kept its hand out.

I’ve known how Sebastian works for three years. There’s no sum that makes a man like that stop, because the paying is the whole point.

Management was never going to be the way through him.

The way through him was a fight.

And I sent my army home to save on rations.

My mother is on the porch by ten, which means she crossed the yard with a purpose. No car, no announcement. Just Elena and two coffees, one of them already held out like terms.

She comes onto my porch the way she comes onto every surface, like it’s been waiting for her, and she’s got the good coffee, and she’s wearing the particular brightness she saves for when she thinks I’ve finally made a choice she can approve of.

“I heard.” She’s not even in the chair yet. “The O’Sullivan boy. That they moved him along.” She sets a cup in front of me. “I won’t pretend I’m sorry, m’ija. That much liability out here was never right. You did the smart thing.”

The smart thing.

There it is. Elena Delgado, who has read a man off his car and his cufflinks her whole life and never off his eyes, sitting on my porch telling me I did the smart thing, and it’s all I can do not to be sick in the flowerbed.

If my mother approves, I did the Elena thing. I read the optics and cut the real thing loose to protect them. I looked at a man who walked into a killing-scared animal to save a friend’s life and filed him under liability.

Three years I spent getting free of a man who does exactly that, and here’s my mother congratulating me for becoming him.

“Now that it’s settled,” she says, careful, wading in the way she does, “it wouldn’t be the worst thing to let Sebastian…”

“Don’t.”

It comes out before I can get the wall back up, and it comes out flat, because flat is the only way I know to say a thing that tears on the way up.

“I’m in love with him.”

My mother goes still with the cup halfway to her mouth.

“I’m scared, Mamá.” The words scrape on the way out. My fingers have gone cold around the cup even though the coffee is hot enough to steam against my face. “Sebastian doesn’t want the program. He wants me to understand that he can reach it. He wants the ranch, my father, Finn, anything I would put between us. I removed Finn because I thought taking away the target would end the attack, and it only taught Sebastian which threat worked.” My throat closes. I force the rest through it. “I did the smart thing you always wanted from me. It’s the most frightened and alone I have ever been.”

For the first time in thirty-two years, my mother doesn’t have the next sentence.

I’ve watched Elena handle every kind of room there is. Weddings, funerals, the bad dinners where the money sits wrong. She always has the pivot, the graceful pivot that walks everybody past the ugly moment. She opens her mouth for it now and it isn’t there, because I’ve never handed her the real thing before, not once, and she has no résumé answer for a daughter she’s looking at.

“You love him,” she says. Turning the words like a coin from a country she’s never been to.

“It doesn’t matter.”