Page 86 of Forbidden Protector

Knox, on speaker, because speaker's just easier these days, one hand answering to me instead of two. His voice comes through too bright for the room I'm standing in.

"She said yes."

"Who said yes to what?"

"Maren." A beat, and I can hear him grinning six miles away, which under any other circumstance would be a sentence I'd want to hear. "I asked her yesterday. She said yes before I finished the question."

For half a second I'm glad, all the way through, and then the rest of tonight closes back over it.

"Congratulations," I say, and mean it, and it comes out flatter than I want it to. Too thin, one line and nothing behind it, because there isn't room in me tonight for somebody else's good news. "Buy the ring with cash. Don't let Dad's accountant anywhere near it."

Knox laughs like that's the funniest thing he's heard all week, tells me he'll swing by this weekend, hangs up before I can find another sentence, and the kitchen goes quiet enough that I can hear the trailer gate banging shut in the north pasture, Roy finishing the load without me.

Mackenzie hasn't moved from where she was standing. She's watching me like she watched Jacob's tracks in the snow, careful eyes, patient, waiting on the part that matters.

"Say it," she says.

"Say what?"

"Whatever's underneath the ring joke. I've spent three weeks watching you not say things, and I'm done letting you get away with it."

"There's nothing underneath it."

"There's a man standing at a window watching his brother's whole life move forward while his own hand won't close, and you want me to believe there's nothing underneath that?"

Something in me finally gives, all at once, the way a fence line gives after a winter of ice finding every weak point in it. I turn on her then, and I know before I open my mouth that whatever comes out is going to be the meanest thing I've said to her since a study with a dead man's folder open on the desk, and I say it anyway, because there's nowhere else in this house to put it.

"Why are you still here?"

"Excuse me."

"You heard me." My voice has gone somewhere low and dirty and entirely without permission.

I let it, because permission is one more thing that got taken from me on that hillside and I'm done asking for it back. "You've got no case, no fucking badge, and a man who can't hold a rifle or sign his own name. I keep waiting for you to figure out there's nothing left here worth staying for and you keep not figuring it out, and I can't decide if that makes you stubborn or if it makes you sorry for me, and I don't know which one I hate worse."

The kitchen goes very quiet.

I watch her eyes blaze. I watch her take it, the whole nasty weight of it, and I wait for her to reach for her coat, for the door, for anything that proves the thing I just said out loud instead of only fearing it. At least then I'd know. At least then the not-knowing would be over.

She doesn't move for the coat.

"Pity doesn't stitch a man's arm in a line shack and then climb into that bed with him," she says, quiet, no heat in it, which is worse than heat, because heat I could match.

"Pity doesn't drive a truck with a man bleeding out in the passenger seat and radio it in on her own name, unbadged, because there wasn't a version of that night where she left you to somebody slower. I've had a lot of feelings about you since a truck idled outside an airport, Holt Blackwater. Pity has never once been on the list."

"Then what's on the list?"

"Come find out."

She crosses the kitchen like she crossed a hospital room. This time there's no bed rail and no monitor leads to work around. Just a man with a bad hand and a worse mouth standing at a window he's been hiding behind all night.

She doesn't wait for him to decide he's ready.

Her hand finds the front of my shirt, fists in it, and pulls. I go, because some part of me that's been standing at attention since a father's study three weeks ago has been waiting for somebody to give it a different order.

"I'm not made of glass," I tell her, all gravel, because I need her to know it before this goes any further. "Whatever you're about to do, don't do it careful."

"I wasn't planning on careful." She gets my shirt open one agonizing button at a time. Her fingers find the scroll over my chest first, tracing the shape of it, then the small line of numbers underneath that she's never once asked me to explain, before trailing slow down the dark ink on my good arm like she's re-memorizing ground she already owns.