“I suppose not, but I’m worried about you.”
“I’ll be okay. I’m home now, and that’s what matters.”
Just as Sarah got off the phone with Abigail, the texts started rolling in, checking on her current well-being and offering tactics and man-flesh for the defense of her farm.
This was why Sarah had come back. Kalona would come to her aid.
Later, Sarah rode Charlie to stock her honor-system cooler with the butter and milk while Blaze drove her truck to the hardware store. The sun prickled her arms and heated the back of her neck, and she gazed over the corn from her vantage point atop the horse.
The corn tassels stirred in the warm July breeze, and the dirt on her empty country road was undisturbed.
But as Blaze had said, the attackers might not use the road.
Blaze had stalked her for a week before he’d broken into her house, and she’d never seen his car nor hide nor hair of him.
But her community hadn’t been on high alert back then.
Now, she would get word.
When she returned from the roadside cooler, she found Blaze sitting on the wide swing on the front porch on the far side of the house.
She handed him a tall glass of sweet tea. “Ten of my friends’ husbands will arrive tomorrow.”
Blaze nodded. “I’ll have a final count of my guys within a few hours. Let’s not talk about this right now. I would like to sit and drink this tea for a few minutes.”
He must be tired because he’d been working his phone while clenching nails in his mouth all afternoon. Plywood nailed on the inside of the house was visible through the windowpanes.
She asked, “I thought that for hurricanes, people nailed plywood to the outsides of the windows.”
“For hurricanes, you want to protect the glass, to keep it from breaking. A high-caliber bullet will punch right through plywood and shatter the window. The plywood is to keep the broken glass outside and reduce the visibility of us inside the house.”
Sarah had envisioned a bunch of wholesome country boys standing up to the Russian mafia goons and scaring them off. High-caliber bullets and broken glass hadn’t figured into it.
“We’ll go over fortifications and defenses later.” Blaze sipped his tea, looking over the silver-green stalks tickling the sky with their cornsilk. “The farm is peaceful.”
Sarah nodded and pushed off with her heels, swinging them in the warm June breeze. “When you get a good crop, it’s amazing.”
“Growing food is an optimistic vocation. Since graduating high school, I’ve studied violence and destruction. It was always couched in terms of rescuing people and protecting the country, but I’ve murdered too many people not to see what I was doing.”
“But they were bad people, right? That’s why you had to go rescue someone from them?”
“They were doing bad things, and that’s why I had to go stop them. But meeting evil with evil doesn’t make you a good person. That’s why all these veterans are calling the counseling line or suffering without help because the moral injury of killing people hurts.”
“And it hurts you, doesn’t it?” she asked.
Blaze nodded and stretched, dropping one arm on the swing behind her.
If this had been high school, Sarah would’ve been a giggly mess about a guy nearly putting his arm around her, but the solemn set of Blaze’s mouth saddened her.
He said, “Let’s talk about anything else.”
Sarah settled back and watched the corn waving at the azure sky that domed all the way to the far horizon. “The crop looks good this year.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Blaze’s shoulder drop, and his lips softened with a hint of a smile. “How can you tell?”
“Lots of ways. You can measure the average height of the cornstalks for growth per month or use satellite imagery to calculate the density of the foliage, but mostly I go out and pick a couple ears and eat them.”
Blaze chuckled softly, his laugh sounding less like unoiled gears grating as the days passed. “I thought it was feed corn.”
