She gets out before I can answer, which is fine, because I don't have an answer that would make any sense to say out loud.
I watch Kourtney reach her, watch the two of them exchange something brief, watch Jesslyn Meyers walk across the compound lot with her camera bag over her shoulder and her boots still muddy from the bayou.
She doesn't look back.
I sit in the truck for a moment after they've gone inside, hands on the wheel, looking at nothing through the windshield.
Four hours back. That's all it was.
I get out of the truck and go find Templar.
Chapter 5
Jesslyn
The woman who meets me at the gate is not what I expected.
I don't know what I expected, exactly. Something harder, maybe, something that matches the fence line and the armed man who checked the truck before waving us through. But the woman crossing the lot toward me in the evening light is warm-faced and unhurried, with the particular steadiness of someone who has done this before and found a way to make it feel ordinary.
"Jesslyn." She says my name like she already knows me, which I suppose she does, in the way that people know you when someone has called ahead. "I'm Kourtney. Come on inside."
She takes the situation in hand the way competent people take things in hand. Not with fanfare, not with the performative efficiency of someone who wants you to notice how capable they are. She just moves, and somehow I'm moving with her. Then the gate is behind me, the compound is ahead, and the long strange day is finally, incrementally, becoming something I might survive.
I glance back at the truck.
Judge is still in the driver's seat, hands on the wheel, looking at nothing through the windshield. He doesn't look at me. I turn back around and follow Kourtney inside.
The common room is bigger than I expected, and louder.
Not loud the way a bar is loud. Not aggressive, not performing. Loud the way a house full of people is loud, the ambient noise of a group that has been together long enough to stop monitoring the volume of itself.
Men at a pool table in the back. Someone's music coming from somewhere I can't locate. The smell of something that was cooked hours ago still hanging in the air, and underneath it cigarette smoke and leather and the specific accumulated smell of a space where a lot of people spend a lot of time.
Kourtney steers me through it with a hand that doesn't quite touch my back, directing without contact, which I appreciate more than I can explain after a day of calculating every person within arm's reach.
"Kitchen's through there," she says. "Bathrooms are down that hall. Your room is upstairs. There's food if you want it. I'll put a plate together either way, you can eat it or not."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't." She says it without offense, without the slight edge that sometimes lives under an offer when you decline it. "Are you hurt anywhere? Anything that needs looking at?"
"No. I'm fine."
She looks at me for a moment with the particular attention of a woman who has assessed a lot of people in a lot of states and knows the difference between fine and fine. Whatever she sees, she accepts it, at least for now. "Come find me if that changes," she says. "My door's at the end of the second floor hall. Doesn't matter what time."
She moves off, and I stand in the middle of the common room with my camera bag over one shoulder and theaccumulated weight of the day pressing down on me, and I look around at the space.
The men at the pool table glance at me and go back to their game. A few others at the bar do the same, that quick assessment, categorization, and return to whatever they were doing.
I'm used to being looked at in new places. It goes with the work. You show up somewhere unfamiliar with a camera and people look, and you learn to hold still under the looking until it passes.
A girl appears at my elbow from what seems like nowhere. She’s young, dark-haired, with the bright, slightly manic energy of someone running on enthusiasm and very little sleep. "I'm Cora," she says, and reaches for my bag. "I'll take that."
"I've got it."
"I know you've got it. I'm offering." She's already lifting the strap from my shoulder, easy and practiced, like she does this regularly. "Kourtney said your room's upstairs. I'll show you."
I let her take it because she's already taken it, and because something about her makes resistance feel rude rather than necessary. She chatters on the way up the stairs about the compound, about where things are, about the wifi password and the bathroom situation on the second floor and the fact that the third step from the top creaks so I shouldn't be alarmed if I hear it at night.
