"It's what I do," I say, which is the same thing I told him at Ruby Memorial, and it's still true and still not the whole truth.
He nods once, taps the laptop with two fingers like a goodbye, and walks out.
Those boots, steady and deliberate, fading down the hallway.
The kitchen is quiet for about three seconds.
Vanna is staring at me.
I don't look at her. I take a very deliberate sip of my sweet tea.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're thinking it."
"I'm thinkinglotsof things."
"Vanna."
She mimes zipping her lips. The grin she's hiding behind her hand is visible from space.
Ellie, at the stove, hasn't turned around.
Waylon is still asleep in her arm like he was born there.
But I can see her shoulders shaking with a laugh she's not even trying to suppress.
"He's a good one, that Coin," Ellie says to no one in particular, like she's commenting on the weather. "Quiet. Steady. Raised those girls all by himself for ten years and never once complained about it. Not once." She pauses, stirring something in the pot. "A man like that doesn't know what to do when someone's kind to his children. Doesn't know what to do with it. Been so long since anyone was."
"Ellie."
"I'm just making an observation, sweetheart. Stir the gravy."
I stir the gravy.
I donotthink about blue-gray eyes or the way he saidyou were good with them,like it cost him something to admit it.
I don’t even think about the way his t-shirt pulled across his shoulders when he turned to leave, or the scar through his eyebrow that I felt in my own skin like a phantom ache.
Hell, I don’t think about the way he looked at Waylon like he was remembering a version of himself from a long time ago.
I stir the gravy and I help Ellie plate dinner and I eat a full meal for the first time in two days because arguing with Ellie about food is like arguing with weather—pointless and exhausting and you're going to lose.
Garrett finds me on the front steps after dinner.
I'm sitting with my knees pulled up, watching the last of the daylight bleed out of the sky over the treeline.
Fall is settling into Morgantown the way it does every year—slowly, then all at once, the mountains going gold and red like someone lit them on fire from the inside.
He sits down next to me and doesn't say anything for a while.
That's how Garrett operates—he'll sit in silence for twenty minutes and then say one sentence that guts you.
Tonight it takes him about five.
"Coin's a good man."
