The honesty of it surprises me as much as it surprises him. That wasn't the plan. The plan was to be composed, agreeable,whatever this man needed me to be until I figured out my next move. But the twelve hours on a bus and the mountain air and the raw look on this man's face pulled the truth out before my defenses could catch it.
Sully's jaw works. He's studying me with those gray eyes, really looking. Reading my face like he's searching for something specific. My grip on the suitcase handle doesn't waver. My smile holds. It's a good smile. Practiced. The one that says everything is fine, I'm fine, the world is fine.
Behind it, my heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat.
"Come on," he says finally, reaching past me for the suitcase. His arm brushes my shoulder, brief, accidental, electric. "Cabin's forty minutes up the mountain. You can have the spare room while we figure this out."
He says it like a man offering a stray dog shelter from rain. Grudging. Practical. But he says it, which means he looked at me, saw whatever he saw, and decided not to put me on the next bus.
Following him to the truck, I watch his back. Wide, solid, moving with the unhurried pace of someone who has nowhere to be except exactly where he is. He swings my suitcase into the truck bed with one hand. One hand. My entire life in a bag, and he lifts it like air.
The passenger door sticks when I try it. He reaches across me, one arm above my head, the other bracing on the truck frame, his chest close enough that the warmth of him registers through my blouse. The door pops open with a metallic groan.
"Gotta lift and pull at the same time," he says, stepping back. "Door's been like that for years."
"Noted." My voice comes out steadier than expected, which is a miracle considering every nerve in my body just fired at once from having him that close.
Climbing in, I buckle the seatbelt. The truck smells like leather, coffee, and hay. Through the windshield, the mountains wait.
Sully gets in on the driver's side. Starts the engine. Pulls out of the lot without another word.
Forty minutes of silence ahead. A cabin belonging to a dead woman's grandson who didn't ask for me. A suitcase with a broken zipper. A Bible with a cracked cover. A body still humming from the brief pressure of a stranger's hand around mine.
It occurs to me, somewhere between town and the first switchback up the mountain, that Edith Cross might have known exactly what she was doing.
CHAPTER THREE
SULLIVAN
She reorganizes my kitchen.
Not right away. First she stands in the doorway of the spare room for about thirty seconds, taking it in. Single bed. Clean sheets I put on this morning at four a.m. because I couldn't sleep. A dresser Gran refinished years ago. Window facing east, toward the mountains. Small, but it's got good light.
"This is perfect," she says, and the way she says it, almost reverent, makes my chest do something I don't care for.
Then she unpacks her suitcase in under ten minutes, because apparently everything Naomi Jacobs owns fits in a dresser and a half. Hangs three blouses in the closet. Lines up her shoes by the door. Sets a Bible with a cracked leather cover on the nightstand. That's it. Her entire life, organized and put away before I've finished my second cup of bad coffee.
And then she reorganizes my kitchen.
"Your spices are in the wrong order," she calls from somewhere near the stove while I'm checking the water trough in the south pasture from the porch.
"They're in the order Gran put them in."
"Your grandmother had the cayenne behind the cinnamon. That's anarchy, Sully."
Nobody has used my name with that much casual authority since Gran. It stops me mid-step on the porch. By the time I get inside, the spice shelf looks like a different shelf. Everything alphabetized. Labels facing out.
"You didn't have to do that."
She's standing at the counter with her sleeves rolled up, hair still wrapped in that scarf from this morning, looking at me with an expression I can't quite read. "You cooked me lunch. Your stew. The least I can do is make sure you can find your own paprika."
The stew was Gran's recipe. Beef, potatoes, carrots, whatever else was in the garden. I made it because it was noon, she hadn't eaten since the bus, and starving a woman under your roof is the kind of behavior that would've gotten me smacked with a wooden spoon from beyond the grave.
She ate two bowls. Didn't comment on the cooking except to ask if I grew the carrots myself. When I said yes, she nodded once, slow, considering. Then she ate a third bowl.
Now she's standing in my kitchen with her hands on her hips, surveying the cabinets like they've personally offended her, and I'm leaning against the doorframe trying to figure out how this became my life.
"We should talk about the arrangement," I say.
