Page 17 of Faultline

The repairs are the easy part. The easy part is always the thing you can hold in your hands.

I eat standing at the kitchen counter. Cold leftover stew from a pot I made three days ago, bread I bought at the Ridgeline last week. The cabin is quiet in the way it has been quiet since my father died. The silence has a shape and a weight, and occasionally, in the low hours before dawn, it feels like a man standing in a room I just walked out of.

After I eat, I go back to the map and work through what I can control. The service road gate needs a real lock and a camera system with battery backup and cellular upload. Motion-activated lighting on the staging area. A second camera covering the north ridge trail where the hide site was positioned.

The cameras cost money I can spend. The installation takes time I'll make. The hard truth underneath both is that I am fortifying a position my father built for living. The concession sits heavy in my chest even as my hand keeps moving across the page.

The notebook sits open on the table. My father's handwriting fills the left page with board feet of white spruce harvested the autumn before he died. My handwriting fills the right with lines of sight from the cabin porch and the distance to the tree line at the north boundary.

Two men in the same book. One planted trees and measured the growth. The other measures the ground between the trees and calculates how fast a man can cross it. I close the notebook and put it in my back pocket where it always rides.

The porch light throws a yellow rectangle across the gravel. Beyond it, the forest is black and silent and full of things I cannot see.

I check the locks, the windows, the porch, and the turnout before walking to the tree line at the north boundary and standing in the cold for a full minute, listening.

The forest gives me nothing. The silence is the same silence it always is, indifferent and vast, and the fact that someone is using it against me doesn't change the fact that I would still die before I let it go.

I leave the porch light on and go inside.

Somewhere in the dark, on a road I can't see, a vehicle with rental plates is driving toward something I haven't figured out yet. The brake line and the hydraulic cut were warnings. The next step will be louder.

Tomorrow morning, Rhys comes to document the evidence. Tomorrow afternoon, I sit across from the woman who looked at me through a café window and refused to give an inch, and I have no tactical solution for what that does to the base of my spine.

I'll be ready.

6

TOSH

Rhys set the meeting for this afternoon at the Ridgeline, which gives me the morning to organize the case files I've been building since Della Pruitt's phone went dead. I've spent the last few days cross-referencing lease records, corporate filings, and the relocation timeline for every client who went quiet.

The pattern is clean enough now to lay in front of a man whose land is being surveyed by the same people who relocated my clients into silence.

The man who drove slowly past the café and watched me like I was a controlled burn he couldn't decide whether to approach. I've been thinking about that look more than I should. The professional in me knows better. The woman in me doesn't care.

The lock on my office door tells me something happened before I touch the knob. The deadbolt is engaged. I locked it last night. But the knob turns half a rotation further than it should, and the door opens without the sticky resistance that Dale Purcey's weatherstripping always forces.

Inside, every surface is almost right. The intake forms are stacked on the desk nearest the window where I left them, except the top three are rotated slightly. My laptop is closed, the way I left it, but the charger cable is looped on the wrong side of the keyboard. I always loop it left. The filing cabinet drawers aren’t shut completely, even though I always ensure they are. The label tabs in the standup holder on my desk aren’t sitting at angles I set.

Nothing is missing. Nothing is damaged. Everything has been touched.

I stand in the doorway and let the assessment run. This is professional work. Somebody defeated a deadbolt, searched every drawer and file, opened my laptop, and put everything back well enough to fool someone who doesn't catalog the position of her charger cable.

Years of crisis work taught me that the distance between alertness and catastrophe is measured in details most people dismiss. I track my charger cable. I track my label angles. I track the rotation of intake forms because the women in those files trusted me with things that could destroy them. The lock on this door was the only barrier between their secrets and whoever walked through it last night.

They counted on me not noticing. That tells me they don't know who they're dealing with.

I call Rhys from the landline. He picks up on the first ring, listens without interrupting, and tells me not to touch anything else until Marc can photograph the scene. Then he pauses, and I can tell he's choosing his next words carefully.

"Bring everything you've got to the Ridgeline this afternoon. All of it. And Tosh, start thinking about where you're sleeping tonight, because it won't be anywhere near that office."

Marc is at my door in under ten minutes, photographs the door, the desk, the filing cabinet, the laptop. He dusts for prints he already knows he won't find.

Before he leaves, he stands in the doorway and looks at me with the particular expression of a man who's been trained to assess threat levels and doesn't like the number he's calculating.

"These people are organized," he says.

"I know."