“Where’d you go?” Mitch asked. “The last four months. You don’t have to tell me what you did, but geography seems likea reasonable request from a man who’s been watering your plants.”
“I don’t have plants.”
“You do now. Cal bought a cactus. It’s on the desk. Don’t kill it, he’s attached.”
I looked at Caleb. He was studying the inside of his mug with intense focus, the tips of his ears turning pink.
“Eastern Europe,” I said. “Then South America. Then back.”
“Specific?”
“No.”
“Fair.” Mitch nodded, like I’d given him exactly what he’d expected, which was nothing, and somehow that was enough. “You get shot?”
“No.”
“Stabbed?”
“No.”
“Fall down some stairs?”
I drank my coffee. The silence stretched.
Mitch’s grin widened. “You fell down some stairs.”
“It was a very unfriendly set of stairs.”
He laughed. The real laugh again, the one that came from somewhere behind his sternum and filled the room without trying, and I felt it land in my chest the same way I’d felt it the first time—like a round I hadn’t heard coming.
“That’s the most Sterling Callahan thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “I’m putting it on a t-shirt. ‘It was a very unfriendly set of stairs.’ People will buy it. I’ll be rich.”
“You’ll be disappointed.”
“I’m used to it. Comes with the territory of knowing you.”
The conversation moved. Or rather, Mitch moved it, steering it through the shallow waters of ranch business and weather and the new foal in the north pasture that had been born while I was gone, and I let him.
I offered single-word responses when required and silence when it wasn’t, and Caleb filled the gaps with quiet observations about the garden he’d started behind the bunkhouse and the bread he’d been baking in the cast-iron range, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I was listening. Actually listening, not just waiting for my turn to stop talking.
The ranch went dark outside. The wind picked up off the pasture, pushing at the east door until the hinges creaked. The stove settled into its night rhythm, ticking as the metal cooled, and the bunkhouse filled with the silence of a building that had decided, for the moment, to be still.
I was on my bed, staring at the ceiling, when the full weight of it hit me.
I could hear them breathing.
Not loud. Not obtrusive. Just the soft, regular sound of two people asleep in a room twenty feet from mine, and the fact that I could hear it at all meant my hearing was better than I’d given it credit for, or I was paying more attention than was strictly necessary.
Probably both.
Mitch and Caleb Pruitt had been living in the back of my head for four months. Behind a door I’d labeled “irrelevant” and kept shut through two continents and one very bad set of stairs. I had carried them through Tbilisi and Caracas and a series of hotel rooms that all smelled the same, and I had not opened the door.
I had not examined the contents. I had treated the whole thing the way I treated every variable I couldn’t control—I had acknowledged its existence, assigned it a category, and moved on.
The door was open now.
I could hear Mitch’s breathing, deeper and slower than his brother’s. I could hear the soft shift of blankets, the creak of abed frame taking weight. I could picture them in there—Mitch on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes, probably snoring at a volume that would wake the dead; Caleb curled on his side, one hand tucked under the pillow, his face relaxed in a way it never quite was when he was awake.
