I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.
Chapter 26
Ben
Kayla was drawing Jolly.
She didn’t know I’d noticed. She was at the kitchen table with her sketchbook open and her pencil moving in those careful, deliberate strokes I’d watched enough times now to recognize as her deep-focus mode. Her tea had gone cold beside her elbow. Her hair was pulled back in a loose knot that was losing the fight against gravity, strands falling around her face that she kept pushing back with the hand that wasn’t holding the pencil.
I sat across from her with a cup of coffee and my phone open to nothing in particular. I’d stopped pretending to read ten minutes ago. The screen had gone dark twice, and I hadn’t bothered to wake it.
Jolly was on the floor between us, stretched on his side with one paw twitching in a dream. He’d come over with me when I’d knocked on Kayla’s door after she’d texted that William was settled at Trish’s for the night. Theo andWilliam had apparently been planning this sleepover for days, complete with a pillow fort blueprint William had drawn on graph paper.
I watched her pencil move. She was working on the curve of Jolly’s ear, glancing down at the sleeping dog and then back at the page, and the concentration on her face was so complete that I could have set off a flare in the kitchen and she might not have looked up.
Before Summit Falls, my evenings had been MREs eaten cold in the back of armored vehicles, or hotel rooms in cities I couldn’t remember the names of, or twelve-hour security details where quiet meant something was about to go wrong.
Now I was sitting in a warm kitchen watching a woman draw my dog while the dog slept at our feet, and the only sounds were her pencil on paper and the clock on the wall.
I didn’t examine it too hard. I just let it be.
The doorbell rang.
Kayla’s pencil stopped. She looked up at me, eyebrows drawing together. Not alarmed. Puzzled. William was at Trish’s. She hadn’t mentioned expecting anyone.
She set the pencil down and pushed back from the table. “I’ll be right back.”
I stayed where I was. Not my door.
Her footsteps crossed the living room. The front door opened. A pause followed that lasted long enough for me to set my coffee down.
Then came Kayla’s voice, and every pleasant, easy thing about the evening turned to ice.
“What are you doing here, Craig?”
Not a question. A wall.
I knew the nuances of her voice by now. The warm version she used with William at bedtime. The tired-after-a-long-day version, where the words came slower and softer and she’d lean against whatever surface was closest. Thequiet version, barely above a breath, that she used only with me and only in the dark.
This wasn’t any of them. This was flat, controlled, and underneath it ran something that could cut steel.
Craig. Kayla had told me about him. The emails. The phone calls. The night that asshole screamed at William over dirt on the carpet. Craig Dutton. Here. At her door.
I moved to the hallway where the angle let me see the front door without being visible from it.
The man in the doorway was mid-thirties, good-looking in a way that required effort. Styled hair. An expensive jacket that didn’t belong on this street, the kind of thing you wore when you wanted people to notice what you could afford.
Everything about him was curated, from the practiced tilt of his chin to the nonchalant lean of his shoulder against the doorframe. The confidence was a performance, rehearsed so many times the performer had forgotten it wasn’t real.
And Kayla. Her shoulders were squared. Her hand was steady on the door. Whatever this man was to her, she was not afraid of him.
She was furious.
“I was passing through.” Craig’s voice was cheerful and relaxed and completely manufactured. “Thought I’d check in on you. See how you and the little guy are doing.”
Casual. As though showing up unannounced at the home of a woman who’d told him to never contact her again was perfectly normal social behavior.
“You need to leave. Right now.”
