Page 23 of Captive

“Contained,” she says.

I don’t say anything.

“That’s what I am. That’s the word you picked. Not held, not kept, not protected.” She takes a step toward me. “Contained. Like a spill.”

“It’s the word Russell uses.”

“You said it. Not Russell.”

“Yes.”

“He said Garrett’s busy through tomorrow. You heard him say nobody needs to bother Garrett. And you said nothing.” She comes closer. Close enough that I can see a vein beating in her temple. “My question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why haven’t you gone to headquarters?”

There’s an answer. I know what it is. I can feel it sitting in me like a stone I swallowed, and I know that if I say it out loud in this shed it will change everything about the next hour and the day after that.

“The road,” I say.

“That isn’t an answer. That’s a direction.”

She’s right. She’s standing twelve inches from me with her notebook in one hand and her chin up, and she’s right.

“Then I’m breaking rule five,” I say. “I have an answer. I’m not giving it to you today.”

She doesn’t move.

I expect her to be angry. I’ve earned it. What moves across her face instead is harder to read, something sharp and quick and almost like recognition, and then she looks down at her notebook and writes something I can’t see.

“Write down that I said that,” I tell her.

“I just did.” She closes the notebook. “Rule five, broken, twelve-nineteen. Reason withheld.”

She walks back to the building and waits at her own door for me to lock it.

* * *

At three, she knocks on her own door from the inside. I come and say her name.

“I want to walk,” she says. “Rule six. I get the pens. The whole fence line, once a day.”

“There’s a rifle somewhere in that brush.”

“Then walk between me and it. You’re good at that.”

I unlock the door.

She walks the perimeter of the pens in the full heat of the afternoon with her hands in her back pockets and her face turned up to the sun like a woman who hasn’t seen it in a week. I walk ten feet behind her on the brush side. She doesn’t look back at me. She doesn’t have to. She knows where I am, the way I know exactly where she is.

At the south gate, she stops.

It’s a pipe gate, chained, not locked. Five rails. A woman who works cattle could be over it in three seconds. The road runs past it, pale and empty, all the way to the county blacktop.

She puts one hand on the top rail and looks down the road.

I stop ten feet back and don’t say anything.