I pull up my sleeve.
Four fingerprints, dark against my sun-brown skin.
A hand-shaped stamp that says you were held and couldn't stop it.
Earl is asleep in his chair.
The chemo exhaustion has him down by five most days.
I don't wake him.
I walk to my truck, close the door, and call Lee.
He's at Earl's in fourteen minutes.
I know because I watch the clock on my phone while I sit in the truck with the doors locked and the rasp in my lap like a woman who has been raised to take care of herself and is doing exactly that while simultaneously wanting someone—one specific someone—to be here.
His truck comes over the rise fast. Too fast.
The kind of driving that happens when a man hears something in a woman's voice that bypasses logic and goes straight to the part of him that runs on instinct and violence.
He parks, gets out, and crosses the distance between his door and mine in four strides.
I open the truck door and he's there.
"Show me."
I push up my sleeve.
He looks at the bruise.
At the four fingerprints darkening on my arm, and his face goes through three things in rapid succession—concern, fury, and then something I've never seen on Lee.
Something cold and still and controlled in a way that has nothing to do with patience and everything to do with a man deciding exactly how much damage he's willing to do.
He touches the bruise.
Gentle.
His thumb tracing the outline of someone else's grip on my skin.
The tenderness of the touch makes the violence in his eyes worse, not better.
A man who handles rescue horses with infinite patience is standing in front of me looking like he could burn something down.
"Who." Not a question.
A single syllable that has an entire plan behind it.
I tell him. Lockhart's man. The message.
The end-of-month deadline. Tax liens. Eminent domain. The hand on my arm.
I tell him the way I'd give a report—clear, factual, controlled—because the shaking has stopped and what's replaced it is the cold clarity of a woman who has been underestimated her entire life and is done tolerating it.
Lee listens.
His hand stays on my arm—over the bruise, like he's covering it. Protecting it. Replacing the grip that hurt with a touch that heals.
