Through the kitchen window, I saw Jolly was, no surprise, right at the fence. Same section, same rigid posture aimed at the wood like it contained the answer to a question only he could hear.
I didn’t call him in. Not tonight. He’d worked hard last night in the raid. Harder than any of us, if I was honest.
He could have his fence.
I opened the drawer by the phone where I kept the takeout menus. Thai, pizza, Chinese. I’d ordered from all three in the past week. The pizza place twice. Maybe I’d just eat cereal. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d made dinner out of a bowl of Cheerios.
Someone knocked on the front door.
Kayla stood on the step with a plate in her hands. Chicken and rice, covered tightly in cling wrap, still warm enough that condensation fogged the plastic from the inside.
“Before you say no,” she said, “just take it. If you don’t want it tonight, put it in the fridge and eat it tomorrow. But you look like you haven’t had a real meal in a while, and I made too much, and it’s just going to sit in my fridge until William and I get tired of looking at it.”
I looked at the plate. Then at her. She was holding it out with both hands, her chin tilted up slightly, and there was something in her expression that dared me to argue.
Not unlike when she’d pulled that milk crate across the yard.
I took the plate. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She didn’t leave. Her eyes had dropped to my left arm, to the white gauze wrapped around my forearm, visible below the pushed-up sleeve of my shirt. The bandage was clean, but it was obvious. Hard to miss when someone was standing two feet away in porch light.
“What happened?”
“Work thing.”
“A work thing that required bandages?”
“Training accident.” I couldn’t tell her the truth aboutwhy I was really here. “It’s nothing. A few stitches. More annoying than anything else.”
She was quiet for a moment, her eyes still on the bandage. “Training is that dangerous?”
“Um, yeah. Sometimes. A little.”
The look she gave me said she didn’t thinka littlewas the whole story. She stepped past me into the house—not aggressively, not like she was claiming territory, but with the quiet certainty of a woman who’d made a decision and wasn’t interested in discussing it.
“Sit down. I’ll heat up the dinner for you.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I know I don’t have to.” She was already in the kitchen, pulling the plastic wrap off the plate. She opened the microwave, set the plate inside, and pressed buttons like she’d lived here for years instead of never having been past the front door. “Where do you keep your forks?”
“Drawer to the left of the sink.”
She found it, pulled one out, and set it on the counter. The microwave hummed.
I stood there in my own kitchen and let someone take care of me. It was such a foreign sensation that I didn’t know where to put it. My friends at Citadel were brothers in every way that counted, but brothers showed concern through sarcasm. Donovan had cracked a joke with the medic about whether the knife was okay. Once Jace heard about this, he would calculate the statistical likelihood of infection and text me a spreadsheet.
This was different. Kayla wasn’t making a joke or entertaining herself. She was heating up a plate of food and finding me a fork because I’d been hurt and that bothered her.
The microwave beeped. She set the plate on the counterin front of me, fork beside it, and leaned against the opposite counter with her arms crossed.
“Eat.”
I sat on the counter barstool and ate. The chicken was good. Seasoned simply, cooked well, the rice soft. It was a meal that didn’t try to be anything other than what it was, and after a week of takeout containers and cold pizza and one deeply regrettable gas-station burrito, it was the best thing I’d tasted in recent memory.
“This is good. Really.”
