It feels almost normal. That's the problem.
Normal is dangerous. Normal makes you soft. Normal is how you forget that you're running, and forgetting is how you get caught. I learned that three years ago when I rented my first apartment as Charlotte and bought curtains and a coffee maker and a small plant for the kitchen window, and for two weeks I felt almost human, almost real, and then I caught myself smiling at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and I stopped because the woman smiling back had a split lip that was still healing and a name that was already dead.
I don't do normal anymore.
But the farmhouse has a bathtub. An actual bathtub, not a shower stall the size of a coffin. And the wood stove throws heat that seeps into the floorboards and radiates up through your feet, and the kitchen has a window that looks out over the tree line, and the light that comes through it in the late afternoon is gold and soft and quiet.
I hate it. I hate how much I want tostay.
Claudio is in the kitchen dismantling one of the burner phones. He's been doing this every other day, swapping SIM cards, rotating numbers, building a communication system from scratch because he doesn't trust any existing infrastructure. His hands work automatically while his eyes scan the tree line through the window. He does this constantly. Watches the perimeter the way I count exits. Compulsive. Necessary. The tic of a person who learned early that the world is full of angles you can't see until it's too late.
We haven't talked about the car. About what I told him.Because staying would have killed me.Five words, and I've been regretting them for three days because five words is five more than Charlotte Richardson has given anyone in three years, and giving pieces of yourself to a man with a gun is how you end up with nothing left to hold.
He hasn't pushed. That's the thing that keeps me off balance. Any other man would have pushed. Would have circled back to it, prodded, leveraged the vulnerability into more information. Claudio heard it, filed it, and moved on. He hasn't mentioned it once. Hasn't looked at me differently. Hasn't softened his voice or gentled his tone or done any of the things men do when theythink a woman has shown them her wound and they want to prove they're safe by being tender about it.
He just drives. And watches. And hands me the lighter before I ask.
I don't know what to do with a man like that.
I pour myself a glass of water from the tap and stand at the kitchen counter. He's three feet away, bent over the phone, a screwdriver between his teeth. In the warm light from the window, I can see the scar on his forearm, the tattoo I still can't read, the way his jaw works when he's concentrating. He's rolled his sleeves to his elbows. His forearms are thick with muscle and scattered with fine dark hair, and I watch his hands work and hate myself for noticing how big and beautiful they are.
"Stop staring," he says around the screwdriver.
"I'm not staring."
"Your breathing changed. You're either staring or having a medical event, and you look healthy enough."
"My breathing didn't change."
He takes the screwdriver out of his mouth and looks at me. Those pale eyes. Wrong-colored. Unsettling. The eyes of a man who catalogues the world the same way I do, which means hesees me doing it, which means I can't hide from him the way I hide from everyone else.
"It went from twelve breaths per minute to fifteen," he says.
"You count my breathing."
"I notice everything."
He goes back to the phone. I stand at the counter with my water and my racing pulse and the very specific fury of a woman who has just been told that a man has been paying close enough attention to her autonomic functions to notice a three-breath deviation.
That's not romantic, Charlotte. That's surveillance.
Then why does your chest feel like that.
I put the glass down. "We need to talk about what happens now. We can’t keep running."
"What happens next is you tell me what you saw at Marchetti, and I use that information to identify the mole and get us back to the compound."
"That's your plan? Wait for me to talk?"
"It's the only plan that matters. You're the only person who can identify the man you saw. Without that, I've got a theory and no proof."
"So I'm leverage."
"You're a witness."
"Same thing."
He sets the phone down. Turns to face me fully. He's leaning against the opposite counter, arms crossed, and the kitchen is small enough that our feet are almost touching. The wood stove crackles in the next room. Outside, the wind pushes through the pines and the whole house makes a low groaning sound, like a ship on rough water.
