Page 55 of The Drifter

That was new, too. I have never once in all the years let Izzy Harper ring out. Not in the middle of a shift, not in the middle of the night, not in the middle of anything.

The phone went quiet in my hand. Then it buzzed.

call me when you can. no rush. just want to hear your voice. A pause, the dots coming and going. Then: you sound different, Sash. good different. but different. and I know you. so.

So.

That one word sat on the screen and looked up at me.

She knew. She didn't know what, but she knew that. Izzy had spent enough years reading the same strangers I read across the same marble, and she had known me since before either of us owned a thing. She could feel the change in me from across a bridge. Two days off. A voice that sounded good-different. A friend who let her ring out.

She was going to come find me. Not today, maybe. But soon. She was going to walk into that lobby and take one look at my face and know, the way I'd know if it were her. Then, there was going to be a conversation I didn’t know how to have—because the thing I'd done, the man I'd done it with, the promise I'd broken, all of it ran straight back through her. Into her family. Into whatever it was her family was in the middle of, the thing that put nameless men in comped suites and blood in rooms I had to make disappear.

I don't even know what he's doing here, I thought.

That stopped me cold, standing there.

I didn't. I had spent two days with that man, taken him through my city and into my bed and out onto my balcony with nothing on, and I didn’t know one single thing about why he was in Charleston. A brother nobody had ever mentioned. Flown in. Comped. Held. Told to get a haircut and new boots by a brother who came by at seven in the morning with a piece of plastic and jokes.

Something was happening. Something was happening around that man, and around this whole family. I was the woman at the desk who had always known everything, who read every guest, who never missed a thing—and I had missed it, because for two days I had not been looking at him like a Dane. I'd been looking at him like a man.

I put the phone back in the drawer.

I stood there a second with my hand on the dresser.

Then, I went back out to the balcony, where he was sitting in the early light over the water with his coffee going cold. He looked up at me. Whatever was on my face made him set the cup down.

"Come here," he said.

And I did. Of course, I did. I crossed the three feet that weren't there anymore and folded down into his lap, bare skin on bare skin in the cool morning air. He wrapped both arms around me and held on. I put my face in his neck.

"Clint," I said.

"I'm right here."

"Why are you in Charleston?"

He went still under me. And for a long moment, he didn't answer.

16

CLINT

Her question sat on my neck where she'd said it, warm as breath. I held her and looked out at the water for a while.

I could have lied. I've built cover stories with less material. A man visiting family, a man between jobs, a man seeing the coast. Any of it would have held for a week, and she'd have believed it, because she wanted to.

That was the problem. She'd have believed it.

"I don't know," I said.

She went still against me. Then, she lifted her head off my shoulder and looked at me, close, reading my face the way she read everything.

"You don't know."

"That's the honest answer." I kept my arms where they were, loose around her, and she stayed in them. "My brother knocked on a motel door in Texas three days ago and said, we need you. I asked what for. He said it'd be explained when I got here. It hasn't been explained. I've been given a suite, a phone I haven't turned on, a credit card with no limit, and about half of every answer I've asked for." I looked at her. "I'm here for my family. That's the whole of what I know."

"Your brothers."