Page 97 of The Faceoff

“Ready?” I say.

She looks at the house one more time. Whatever’s on her face she folds up and puts away before I can read it.

“Ready,” she says, and climbs up into the cab, and this time she doesn’t argue about the height.

I don’t drive straight in.

I pull into the driveway at the Raven House and put it in park and don’t reach for the door, because something’s wrong with her and has been the whole drive — not the smoke-and-disaster wrong, a quieter wrong, the wrong of a person who’s run out of things to manage and doesn’t know what to do with her hands when there’s nothing left to fix.

I look over at her.

“You okay?”

She doesn’t answer.

That’s not like her. Sloane always has an answer — a dry one, a deflecting one, a complete grammatical sentence built to give nothing away — and the silence where the answer should be is louder than anything she could’ve said. She’s looking out the windshield at my house with her jaw set and her hands in her lap, and she’s gone somewhere I can’t follow, and I don’t push.

I reach over instead and take her hand.

It’s freezing. She’s been cold this whole time and didn’t say, sat with bare legs on a frozen lawn in my hoodie and didn’t mention it once, because mentioning it would be needing something. Her hand is small and cold in mine and I fold both of mine around it, warming it, and I lift it and press my mouth to her knuckles, slow, and I don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say that she could take right now.

I just hold her cold hands against my mouth and wait.

She turns and looks at me. Her eyes are too bright and she’s furious about it, I can tell, furious at her own face for doing a thing without permission.

“I can still talk to Margaret,” she says. “About the store. The cot. I don’t have to —”

“No.”

“Beau—”

“You’re not staying in a freezing storeroom on a cot because you can’t stand to need the warm room that’s right here.” I keep her hand in mine. “You’re staying with me. As long as you need to. Not until it’s convenient, not until you’ve worked out how to pay me back, not until you’ve found a way to make it a transaction you can live with. As long as you need to. That’s the whole offer. There’s no fine print.”

She stares at me.

I watch her try to find the angle, the catch, the thing she can argue with — and there isn’t one, I made sure there isn’t one, and the not-finding-it undoes her more than the fire did. She doesn’t have a file for this. I can see her reaching for one and coming up empty. Nobody’s ever handed her a thing without a bill attached and she genuinely does not know what to do with her hands.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” she says, finally. Quiet. The most honest thing she’s said all day.

“You don’t have to do anything with it,” I tell her. “That’s the point. Come inside. It’s warm.”

The house takes us in the way the house takes everyone in.

It’s empty — the guys still at practice, the one I bailed on — and it’s quiet and warm after the cold, and I carry her bag up the stairs to my room with her trailing behind, and I set it on the bed and then I do the thing I’ve been thinking about doing since the lawn, which is make space.

I clear the top drawer of my dresser. Just empty it — socks and whatever into the drawer below, doesn’t matter — and leave it open, empty, hers. Then I go to the closet and shove my stuff down the rail, all of it, hangers screeching, until there’s a clear foot and a half of space, and I find the spare hangers in the back and hang them in the gap, waiting, ready.

“There.” I step back. “Drawer’s yours. Closet space is yours. Bathroom’s the one you know. There’s a key to the front door on the hook by the stairs, take it, it’s yours while you’re here.”

She’s standing in the doorway watching me do all this with an expression I can’t read, which is rare, because I’ve gotten good at reading her.

“You cleared a drawer,” she says.

“You need a drawer. People need a drawer.”

“You cleared a drawer in under a minute. Like you’d thought about it.”

“I thought about it.” No point lying. “On the drive. Figured you’d argue less if it was already done than if I asked where you wanted to put things.”