Page 4 of Faultline

I've taped the Aurora Covenant logo to the front window with packing tape because the decal was sized for a glass door and this window isn't one. I haven't made it back to Palmer to get a new one printed. From the street, it looks like a threat written with craft supplies.

This is my fresh start. I've had several. They keep getting smaller.

I unpack the last box of intake forms and stack them on the desk nearest the glass, where the light is best and the heater reaches. The building is a converted storefront between the post office and an empty lot where somebody once tried to open a bait shop.

The landlord, a retired trapper named Dale Purcey, charged me half-market rent and told me not to let the pipes freeze. I told him I grew up in a house where the pipes froze every winter, and I knew what a heat cable was. He looked at me for a long moment and concluded I wasn't lying. Then he left without signing the lease in front of me.

I found it slid under the door the next morning. Apparently, that's how trust works in Whitewater Junction. You say something true, and a stranger decides to believe you while you're not watching.

The Marshal case brought me to Whitewater Junction. What happened to Traci Vance and the other survivors who came through Aurora Covenant's network is the reason I stayed.

Six months ago, this town helped expose a trafficking network that had been running through a mining camp twenty miles north of here, protected by corrupt federal officials who should have shut it down years earlier. The people bled for it. They lost Emma Blackwater before most of them understood what they were fighting. They watched their sheriff spend three years tearing himself apart over her murder while the federal government protected the men responsible. When it finally broke open, the FBI descended on this town like it was a crime scene, because it was.

They earned the right to heal in peace. Some of them are going to need help doing it, whether they admit it or not.

That's what I do. I sit across from people on the worst day of their lives and help them figure out how to have a next day. I'm good at it for the same reason recovered addicts make the best sponsors. I know what the ground looks like from below, and I know what it costs to stand up on it. I don't talk about the specifics. The specifics are mine.

The café across the street is called Ridgeline. By eight in the morning the windows are fogged and the parking lot has more trucks than spaces. I need coffee before my heater finishes losing its argument with the thermostat, so I lock up and cross the street with my shoulders pulled tight against the cold.

Inside, the warmth is dense and immediate. The Ridgeline is small, a dozen tables crammed between a counter and a pass-through to the back, and the noise level says volume is a competitive sport in this town. A group of ranchers leans against the counter debating hay prices with an urgency that suggests one of them is losing money by the hour. Two women in nursing scrubs share a plate of eggs before their shift at the clinic, both of them eating with the efficient speed of people who know their break ends in twelve minutes. A kid in a baseball cap refills sugar dispensers with the grim focus of someone serving a sentence.

I order at the counter. The woman working the register has dark hair pulled into a knot and the demeanor of someone who stopped tolerating nonsense around age fourteen and never looked back. She hands me my cup and takes my money. The nod she gives me communicates exactly nothing beyond acknowledgment that I exist and have paid.

She doesn't ask my name. She doesn't smile. She's the most efficient person I've met in this town, and if I had to pick one ally in a bar fight, it would be her without question.

I'm starting to recognize faces here. The woman who runs the post office and knows more about the personal lives of every resident than the sheriff does. The volunteer fire chief, who also teaches Sunday school and fixes lawn mowers on the side and whose voice carries through walls like a public address system.

Hank, from the hardware store, who nodded at me once from across the street. I've been told this constitutes formal acceptance into the community. The bar is low. The sincerity behind it isn't.

The ranchers at the counter are arguing about a company now. A mining outfit making offers on land north of town. One of them says "twice appraised" like he's tasting the words and can't decide whether they're sweet or poison. Another shakes his head and says nothing, which around here communicates more than a paragraph would in Anchorage. The third man, older, stares into his mug and lets the other two burn themselves out.

I've watched enough people in crisis to know the difference between a man who hasn't decided and a man who has decided and doesn't want to say. He is the second kind. I file the conversation and take my cup outside.

Whitewater Junction in the morning has a rhythm I'm still learning. Kids walk to school in loose clusters, backpacks bouncing, breath visible in the September air. The volunteer fire truck sits parked outside the community hall, its chrome dulled by a summer of dust. A woman in a puffy vest rolls past in a flatbed and waves at someone on the sidewalk without slowing down. Two doors down, a man tacks a handwritten sign to a telephone pole advertising firewood by the cord. Hank stands outside his shop and watches the street with the slow attention of a man reading a perimeter.

The town is beautiful and it's exposed. One road in and out. Limited cell service. No police station of its own, just Rhys's department covering a jurisdiction that stretches across more square miles than most people can visualize.

A community of two hundred and forty-seven people who know each other's names and don't lock their doors. They trust the mountain will keep out whatever the mountain has always kept out. That kind of trust is a beautiful thing. It's also the first thing predators exploit.

I think about this more than I should. Occupational hazard.

Back at the office, I boot the laptop and pull up the client follow-up list I built last week. More than a dozen names.

Women I connected with during the Marshal investigation, survivors who accepted services through Aurora Covenant, a few locals who came to me quietly after the case went public. Some are stable. Some are fragile. All of them trusted me with something they had never told anyone, and that trust doesn't expire because the federal case closed.

I work through the list. The first several check-ins go smoothly. Brief calls, steady voices, women who are rebuilding and sound like it.

One of them laughs at something her daughter said during breakfast, and I close my eyes and hold the phone against my ear for an extra second. Six months ago that woman could barely finish a sentence without checking the door. That laugh is the sound of someone putting distance between herself and the worst thing that ever happened to her. It's the only metric that matters in this work, and it's the reason I keep doing it even when everything else about the job makes me want to put my fist through drywall.

Another woman, a DV survivor I placed in a community near Palmer, tells me she moved to Anchorage last month. New job at a medical billing company. Found it herself through an online posting, interviewed twice, and negotiated her start date. She sounds steady, clear, in control. She gave me her new address before I asked. That is what a voluntary relocation looks like.

The next call goes to voicemail. I leave a message.

The next goes to a number that has been disconnected.

Della Pruitt. Mid-thirties. Two young children. Former trafficking survivor who relocated to Whitewater Junction from Fairbanks earlier this year with Aurora Covenant's support.

I set her up with housing assistance and enrolled her kids in the local school. I connected her with Sela Mitchell at the clinic for medical follow-up.