I trace the edge of her shoulder blade with my thumb. Small, slow. She makes a tiny sound in her sleep and tucks closer.
I close my eyes a second.
Aisha Khoury's name doesn't come up the way it usually does. The loop that's run in my head every quiet night for six years doesn't run tonight. I check for it, almost like checking a dressing on a wound, and it's quiet.
For the first time in a long time I'm not being punished by my own brain.
I let out a long breath.
Don't trust it. Not yet. But notice it.
At some pointafter two I slide out from under her, kiss her forehead, tuck the blanket to her shoulder, and go downstairs. Not because I want to. Because a man with a perimeter doesn't sleep for six hours on the same night somebody's friend got arrested trying to take his woman.
His woman.
I'm already using the phrase in my head.
Forty-eight hours ago I was in this cabin alone with a mug of bad coffee.
I check the front door. Locked. Back door. Locked. Shutters. Closed. Shotgun. In place.
I walk the outside quick, flashlight off, eyes adjusted. Tree line quiet. No new sounds. The SUV Marcus left in is long gone. Gravel settled.
My sat phone is on the counter. I check it. Nothing new from Marcus. Two from my contact at the detachment confirming Tremblay's in custody and cooperating. One from a number I don't recognize that I open cautiously.
Gray. It's Aisha's brother. Saw your name on a list regarding the Hennessy story. Wanted to say thank you. She'd have liked that you're still putting yourself between someone and the thing coming for them. We think about you often. Tamer.
I sit down on the kitchen stool.
Read it again.
Her brother. Tamer Khoury. I remember his face from the funeral. I remember him gripping my shoulder while I stood in the back and would not let me disappear.
I put the phone down. Rest my hands on the counter. Let my head drop.
I don't cry. Haven't in a long time. But something in my chest shifts, the way a bone sets back into a joint. A small click. Relief and grief threaded together.
I sit there a long time.
Then I type back.
Thank you. I think about her every day. I'm glad you reached out.
Send.
Simple.
The kind of simple you only get to when you've been carrying something for six years and a woman upstairs took just enough of it off your shoulders to let you breathe around it.
When I come back upstairsshe's awake.
Lamp back on low. She's sitting up against the headboard in my shirt with the blanket pulled to her waist. Hair loose around her shoulders. She took the braids out.
She looks at me.
I stop in the doorway.
She takes me in. The boxers. The tired. The whatever is showing on my face that I can't quite hide right now.
