Page 51 of Devoured

He said it easy. Too easy. She'd spent three months learning the inch of difference between Dean Royston relaxed and Dean Royston holding still, and this was the second one, the set across his shoulders, the half-second his hand stalled on the mug before it closed, the particular stillness that on him meant the opposite of calm. Let them try was the thing a man said when the trying had already started to work and he didn't want it in the room with him yet.

She didn't push. Not in front of Nathan, not with the day she'd had, not when the man had told her himself it wasn't her problem to carry. But she made a note, the quiet kind, the kind that went in the part of her that had found a buried clause in a folder three weeks ago and not been able to leave it alone: tomorrow, the boundary maps. The Henderson line ran along the north section. She wanted to see, on paper, exactly how close the patient money had crept to the fence.

Then Helen's car came up the drive with the kids in it, and the kitchen went from quiet to bedlam in the space of one slammed car door, and the maps went back in the drawer in her head where she kept the things she'd deal with tomorrow.

Giana found her on the porch steps an hour later, shelling peas for tonight's dinner.

The girl sat down a step above her without a word, which was Giana's way, she arrived in your vicinity and conducted reconnaissance before she committed to anything as binding as conversation, and watched Lara's hands work the pods for a while. Lara didn't fill the quiet. She'd learned that much: that this one couldn't be coaxed, only waited out, that she came to you on her own clock or not at all.

After a while Giana reached over, without being asked, and took a handful of pods, and started shelling them into the bowl in clumsy imitation of Lara's hands.

They worked like that for a long stretch in the gold light, not talking, the girl's shoulder warm against Lara's arm. Lara thought she might have just been handed something, the plain uncommented weight of a guarded child choosing, for no reason she'd ever say out loud, to come and sit this close, and she had the sense not to make a single thing of it. She just kept shelling peas, and bumped the girl's shoulder once with her own, light, and got, after a second, the smallest bump back.

"I like it when you're here," Giana said.

She said it to the bowl, not to Lara, fast and low and flat, the way you say a thing you've decided to say before you can talk yourself out of it, her eyes down on her own clumsy hands and her ears going pink. Then she kept right on shelling like she hadn't said anything at all, like the words could be left lying there on the step between them and not picked up if Lara was foolish enough to grab at them.

Lara didn’t grab at them. Everything in her wanted to, wanted to put an arm around the bony little shoulder and say something back the size of what she'd just been handed, and she knew, with a certainty she couldn't have explained, that it was exactly the wrong move, that this child would bolt from anything that big. So she kept her own eyes on the peas and her voice as even as Giana's had been.

"I like being here," she said. Just that. True, and small enough to be safe.

"Okay," Giana said, satisfied, and reached for another handful of pods, and that was the end of it, and it was everything.

It was Remi who found her last, when the light had gone long and orange and the kids were inside fighting the bath.

She came out with two beers, handed Lara one she hadn't asked for, and dropped into the rocker with her boots on the rail. For a minute she just turned the bottle on the arm of the chair without drinking it, which, Lara had learned this much about Remi, was not her natural state, and therefore meant something was coming.

"He didn't come home Saturday night," Remi said finally, eyes on the dark land and not on Lara. "And he's been walking around all day with a face I haven't seen on him in a long time. You've got the match to it." She took a pull off the beer. "So I'll ask you one thing and then leave it alone. Is this real, or is it a thing he's going to talk himself out of in a month because he's decided he doesn't get to have it?"

Lara turned her own bottle in her hands. She'd spent a year deflecting questions about her own heart and was good at it, but Remi was sitting out here scared on her brother's behalf, and that earned something.

"I don't know what it is yet," she said. "I'm trying not to need it to be anything. He was honest with me. Told me up front there's a line he won't cross. No marrying again. None of it." She shrugged one shoulder. "I heard him. I'm not planning a wedding he already said isn't coming. I'm just enjoying it."

Remi studied her a moment. "He told you about Lucia?"

"Over coffee. He told me how unhappy he made her."

Remi shut her eyes for a second, and when she opened them she'd decided something. "Then I'm going to tell you the part he leaves out. And he'd be furious, and I'm telling you anyway, because I've watched him carry the wrong version for four years." She looked out at the going-down light. "His version's the one where he was cold and far off and worked too much and drove her to it. That's the lie. The truth is he never stopped reaching for her. She just wouldn't let him land a hand."

"Meaning what," Lara said. Quiet. An auditor's question show me the line item.

"Meaning he'd come in off a sixteen-hour day and sit down next to her and ask what was wrong, what she needed, what he could do, and she'd look at him like something she'd stepped in and say nothing, you wouldn't understand, leave me alone. Every time. He'd reach for her and she'd go stiff. He begged her to see somebody — a doctor, anybody — and she'd act like he'd insulted her and not speak to him for a week." Remi's jaw tightened. "She locked every door he ever put his hand on. He kept knocking for years."

Lara sat with that. She could feel the shape of the thing settling into her, enormous, the contradiction she hadn't been able to name in her own kitchen with his hat going to rags in his hands. The wall isn't built on what happened. It's built on what she told him happened.

"She wasn't a monster," Remi went on, lower now. "I need you to hear that part too. She was a city girl who woke up at the end of the world and couldn't breathe out here, and whatever was eating her was real, and nobody could get near enough to help. That's the sad true thing. But somewhere in all that locked-up misery she figured out the one move that worked on him, and she used it till the day she died; she made it his fault. Told him he'd failed her. That if she was drowning it was the kind of man he was. And he believed her." She turned the bottle. "He still does. That's what kills me. The one thing she ever talked him into was the thing that wasn't true, and it's the one he kept."

"Why are you telling me?" Lara said.

"Because you need to hear the truth, not this bullshit version Dean's convinced himself is real." Remi finally drank. "I'm not asking you to fix him. Lord knows we've all tried the family way and it slides right off, because we're family and we're supposed to be kind." A dry breath. "Ask anybody who was here. Helen, Chase, my dad on an honest day. They'll tell you the same. It's not just me. He's only the one man alive who'll never hear it, because if it's his fault then he had some power over it, and my brother would rather be guilty than helpless." She shook her head. "He'll see it one day. He's not stupid, he's just stubborn and sad. I only didn't want you down at the bottom of it with him, believing you're the thing that isn't good enough, when the truth is he decided a long time ago that he isn't, over something that was never his to carry."

She drained the beer and stood, and squeezed Lara's shoulder once on the way past, hard, the family way.

"Anyway. I've said it. Do what you want with it." The loud easy Remi slid back over the other one like water closing. "And if you tell him I told you, I'll deny every word and put a snake in your truck."

Then she was gone inside, into the noise and the light, and left Lara alone on the dark porch with two bottles and a thing in her chest the exact size of the wall she'd hit in his kitchen, except now she could see clean through it to the lie holding it up.

She wasn't going to take it to him. Not tonight. Maybe not for a long time. She'd made herself a promise across a tiny kitchen table over cold coffee, and the promise still held: she was not going to be the woman who set herself the project of saving a man, who made his healing her job, who poured herself out trying to fix what he wasn't asking her to fix. She knew the taste of that disease and this wasn't going to be that.