Coffee. Black. Two sugars.
The taste is the smell of every morning I had before the gravel road, and I sit in the back seat of an unfamiliar truck with the taste of coffee with two sugars on my tongue and I look up at the rearview to see whether Dean is going to acknowledge that he remembered.
He is looking at the road.
Thaw turns half in the passenger seat. I do not have to look at him — the bond carries his small smile. I do not look up. I just sip the coffee and let the forming thread to Dean go a degree warmer, and that is all that has to happen, and the wolf at the wheel is the kind of man who knows it.
I just keep hearing Fen’s rough voice, over and over. He said my name three times.
The third one sent me here.
Chapter seventeen
Jen
I finish the coffee Dean made me and he clears his throat. "Harek."
Harek's head comes up. Green eyes find Dean in the rearview.
"The folder. The one from the medical wing. Can you grab it?"
A pause. Harek's hand on mine goes still. "Yes."
"Get it out."
Harek doesn't move for a second. He's looking at Dean. Then he reaches down between his boots and pulls the duffel up onto his knees, and from inside it he draws out the manila folder I last saw on the kitchen table of the cabin. He sets it on the seat between us. He doesn't let go.
"Dean," I say.
"You want me to look at it right now?"
"I do."
"In a moving truck. In the middle of the night."
"Yes."
Thaw turns half in the passenger seat. His gold eyes go to Dean. He hasn't been told this is coming either.
"What didn't you show her in the cabin?" Thaw says.
"The math behind the marker score," Dean says. "The seven-point-four. I’ve been studying that file."
I look at Dean in the rearview. He's keeping his eyes on the road. His jaw is tight.
"Why now?"
"Because I found information about you. Because we're four hours out from the safehouse and I can't justify you not knowing."
I look at Harek.
"Show me."
Harek opens the folder.
He turns past the spreadsheet I have already seen. He turns past the patient file with my driver's license photo. He stops at a page I have not seen.
It is a chart, hand-drawn over a printed table. Years across the horizontal axis. The graph goes back forty years.
