Page 55 of Patch

“You already knew that.”

“Brazil called it in eleven minutes ago.”

“Then tell me the rest of it. All of it. Right now, while I’m standing here, before I get in that car.”

His jaw shifted. A single tick. A half-second stall before his next word. The tell was small. On anyone else it would have been nothing. On him it was a billboard. His face held still as a professional courtesy, and the courtesy had just lapsed.

“Vehicle in the lot of your grandmother’s facility.” He said it like a man reading a rotation. “Registered to a shell company Gunner flagged. Two sightings in four days. Not confirmed.”

Each word landed on its own. No embellishment. No softening. Just the architecture of a problem he had been sitting on for at least a day, maybe longer, delivered the way a man delivers weather reports to someone standing in the rain.

My arms folded across my chest.

The movement was automatic. Defensive. My forearms crossed over the scrub top with its parking-lot grime and its faint bloodstain from Freak’s shoulder that the laundry had never quite gotten out. My voice didn’t rise. Didn’t crack. Didn’t do any of the things a normal person’s voice did when the ground gave way. “A car has been sitting outside my grandmother’s building for four days, and you’ve had that for one of them.”

Not a question. A fact.

Patch didn’t flinch.

His hands stayed flat on the table. The scars across his knuckles caught the light. Old, healed. His eyes held mine. The silver at his temples didn’t move. “I know where everyone is.” The sentence that covered everything from the gate rotation to the Prospect shift to the seventy-eight-year-old woman in a memory care facility. “That’s the job. Unconfirmed information passed to a civilian creates more risk than it neutralizes.”

The words were true. I knew they were true the way I knew bone was denser than tissue. Unconfirmed information handed to a frightened person makes the frightened person do something, and the something is usually wrong. I have said a version of that to clients about their own animals for six years.

It was the same argument I would have made in his position. I knew that. The knowing sat in my chest where the anger lived and made the anger worse, because being right on both sides of a wall meant the wall was the problem, and the wall was us.

I didn’t scream. Didn’t cry. Didn’t reach for the performance of either. My voice stayed low, steady, the register of a woman who argued by restating facts rather than raising her volume. “You made a decision about what I could handle.” Each word precise. Measured. “You made it without me.”

Patch’s hands went unnaturally still.

The long fingers. The scarred knuckles. They lay flat on the table like instruments someone had set down mid-procedure.

He opened his mouth. The words were there. I could see them forming behind his eyes. Something that might have been an explanation. Something that might have been the closest thing to an apology he could produce.

I didn’t wait for it.

I turned and walked to the door, and I didn’t look back.

The clubhouse door closed behind me. Heavy wood. Double-hung. A door that made sound when it shut, and the sound said everything the room inside had left unsaid.

Patch stood at the table with the unfinished sentence still in the room. I knew that without seeing it. The knowledge of something you have already decided to walk away from.

There was a woman standing at my driver’s door.

I hadn’t heard her cross the gravel. Small, pale blonde hair nearly white in the security light, and eyes a color I’d only ever seen in a photograph of a wolf. “You’re going to Maple Grove.” Not a question. Her accent shaped it into something formal.

“Who are you?”

“Vasha. My husband is Slider.” She didn’t move out of the way. “I was in the room this week when they said your name. I have been waiting to decide whether to come and find you, and then I saw you come through that door with your face like that, so the decision is made.”

“I’m in a hurry.”

“I know exactly how much of a hurry you are in. That is why I am standing here.”

I put my hand on the door handle, and she put hers flat on the window and neither of us moved.

“I have to get to my grandmother.”

“Yes.” She said it immediately, without any argument in it at all, which wasn’t what I was braced for. “Of course you do. I am not telling you not to go.”