I hang up. Set the phone on the table.
Charlotte is still looking at me. Her coffee is cold. Her feet are bare. And she's smiling. Not the ice-queen smile. Not the Charlotte Richardson smile. Something newer. Something that belongs to the woman who threw a coffee filter at my chest andkicked me under the table and let me stand behind her in the kitchen with my mouth against her ear.
"Two days," she says.
"Two days."
"That's a long drive."
"Sixteen hours, roughly. Back roads."
"We should probably leave soon."
"Probably."
"But the coffee's still hot."
I look at her. She looks at me. The cabin is quiet. The birch trees outside catch the morning light and throw long shadows across the floor.
"Finish your coffee," I say.
She takes a slow sip. Watching me over the rim. "You know, for a man who doesn't do gentle, you make a very good cup of coffee."
"I never said I don't do gentle."
"You implied it."
"I implied I don't do it for everyone."
Her bare foot finds my shin under the table again. This time she doesn't kick. She rests it there. Warm against my leg. A small weight. A small claim.
"Okay, principessa," I say. "Drink your coffee. Then we go catch a rat."
She raises her mug. "To rat-catching."
"To rat-catching."
We drink. The morning is quiet. The cabin holds us for a little while longer, and I welcome it, because in two days we'll be back at the compound and the quiet will be over and the world will start grinding again, and I want to keep this. This kitchen. This coffee. This woman in my shirt with her sharp mouth and her bare feet and her eyes that see everything.
I want to keep all of it.
The realization startles me. No crash. No alarm. Just a quiet click, like a magazine sliding home. The simple, astounding certainty that this woman has become something I'm not willing to lose.
I finish my coffee. Stand. Hold out my hand.
She takes it.
Chapter Twelve: Charlotte
Thedrivebackisdifferent from the drive out.
When we left the compound eight days ago, I sat in the passenger seat and counted exits and smoked my cigarettes and didn't talk because talking meant giving something away and I had nothing left to give. The silence between us was a wall. Thick, reinforced, built from mutual distrust and the specific awkwardness of being trapped in a small space with someone whose job description includes the word "disposal."
Now the silence is different. It's the kind of quiet that exists between two people who have already said the hard things and don't need to fill every second with noise to prove they're still connected. He drives. I sit with my feet on the dash, which he hated on day one and tolerates now because he's learning which battles matter. The road unspools ahead of us in a long grey thread, and the trees are thinning out, giving way to openfarmland and the occasional strip of development that means we're getting closer to civilization.
“Can we grab smokes on the way?”
“Sure, principessa, we can do that.”
