Page 119 of The Wild Card

Bought more coffee.

Your mail is on the counter.

Polite. Impersonal. Like we’re strangers who happen to share a kitchen.

We are strangers. That’s what I wanted.

I don’t know why it feels like dying.

* * *

Work is a blur.

I throw myself into case files, tactical assessments, anything that requires focus. Daniels comments that I’m putting in more hours than anyone on the team. Foster watches me with that worried expression I’ve started avoiding.

“You look like shit,” he says on Tuesday.

“Thanks.”

“When’s the last time you slept more than four hours?”

“I sleep fine.”

“I know you sleep at the cabin on the weekends. On the floor. That’s not sleeping; that’s punishing yourself.”

I don’t answer. There’s nothing to say.

Gym after work. Ninety minutes. Two hours if I can manage it. I lift until my muscles shake, until I physically cannot lift anymore, until I’m so exhausted that maybe, maybe I’ll be able to close my eyes tonight without seeing her.

Rodriguez asks if I’m training for something.

“Just staying sharp,” I tell him.

He doesn’t look convinced. He looks worried. They all do.

* * *

Friday afternoon after work, I drive to Oklahoma.

The cabin is dark when I arrive. Cold.

I don’t care.

I grab my tools and start working on the kitchen cabinets I’ve been building. Measure, cut, sand. Measure, cut, sand. The same motions over and over until my hands are raw and my back aches and it’s three in the morning and I still can’t stop thinking about her.

I drive a nail in wrong. Split the wood. Have to start the whole piece over.

I don’t care about that either.

The weekend passes in a blur of sawdust and sleepless nights.

I fix the porch railing. Replace two more windows. Patch the hole in the floor where the raccoons got in. By Sunday evening, my body is wrecked, and my hands are covered in blisters, and the cabin looks marginally less like a condemned building.

None of it makes me feel any better.

I drive back to Dallas as the sun sets, timing it so I’ll arrive after she’s likely asleep. The apartment is dark when I walk in. Quiet.

But there’s a new Post-it on the fridge.