"Yeah, and you're helping." She smiled.
He sliced garlic while she seasoned the chicken. He boiled water while she opened the wine. They moved around each otherin the small kitchen with the ease of two people who had been doing this long enough that the choreography was unconscious. She reached past him for the olive oil. He stepped left without being asked. Her hip brushed his as she turned from the counter to the stove.
Initially, neither of them mentioned the case.
They ate at the kitchen table with the window open and the evening air coming through the screen. The food was better than it had any right to be, given that neither of them was much of a cook. The wine was decent. The conversation was light and directionless, the kind of talk that fills space without trying to accomplish anything, which was exactly what both of them needed.
Callie told him about a call she had taken that morning from a tourist who wanted to report a "suspicious figure" on a ridgeline outside High Peaks. It turned out to be a surveyor with a tripod. McKenzie had driven forty minutes to check it out and came back with the man's business card and a look on his face she would not forget.
Noah almost laughed. The sound felt unfamiliar. There hadn’t been much of it in the house lately.
"How's he holding up?" Noah asked.
"McKenzie? He's McKenzie. Complains about everything, works harder than everyone, eats four sugars in his coffee and wonders why he can't sleep. He's fine." She paused. "He's worried, though. He won't say it. But the way he checks the ridgelines when we drive anywhere, the way he watches tree lines. He's thinking about it."
"Everyone is."
"That's the problem. The whole county is watching the hills. Hunters are calling in other hunters. A guy in Keene reported his own neighbor because the man was carrying a rifle case to histruck during deer prep. Turned out to be an eighty-year-old with a .22 and a grudge against woodchucks."
"That's going to get worse as hunting season opens."
"I know. Every report we follow up on is time we're not spending on the actual case. And every report we don't follow up on is a liability if something happens."
Noah refilled her glass. "How are you holding up?"
She looked at him across the table. "I'm tired. Not the kind you fix with sleep. The kind where you wake up already thinking about the thing you went to bed trying not to think about."
"I know that kind."
They cleared the plates. Noah washed. Callie dried. Normal was the one thing his life hadn't been for a long time. This felt close.
They took their wine to the porch and sat down. The lake stretched out in front of them, dark now, the last light gone from the water. Stars were appearing through the gaps in the canopy. The loon was gone or invisible. Ed Baxter's porch light clicked on next door, the timer kicking in at the same time every evening. The regularity of it was comforting in a way Noah wouldn't have noticed a month ago.
“So… about my lease coming up next month,” Callie said.
She said it the way she said most things. Directly. Without preamble. Looking at the lake, not at him.
“October, right?”
“October fifteenth.”
Noah took a sip of wine. “What are you thinking?”
"I'm thinking I spend four nights a week here and three at a place I'm paying rent on just to keep my mail organized."
"That does seem inefficient."
“Uh, huh.” She turned to look at him. “Look, I’m not asking for a ring, Noah. I'm asking if the spare room offer still stands. Or whatever we're calling it."
"We're calling it the spare room."
"Right. The spare room where none of my things are and where I never sleep."
He looked at the lake. "Bring your stuff."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
