Page 69 of The Drifter

"Izzy."

"I'm not going to tell anybody. I hold the room, remember. I'm a vault." She was grinning so wide it hurt to look at. "Sasha Benning. You watched me fall in love with one of those men and you looked at me like I'd lost my mind, and now look⁠—"

“I watched a lot of things after that.”

“Exactly. And then, you went and—" She stopped. Something crossed her face, quick, and the grin gentled into something with more weight in it. "You know what, though? In all seriousness. For one second." She held my eyes. "You deserve it. Whatever this is. However it goes. You have spent your whole life handing other people the thing they wanted and standing back behind the counter. If some big, quiet man walked into your lobby and handed you something for once—Sasha, you deserve it. Don't you dare let that vow of yours take it back from you. You hear me? You don't owe the world your loneliness."

The room went quiet.

And I sat on my sofa with my best friend holding my hand, on a morning that had started with good sex in a bathtub and a pistol going out my door, and I finally understood something I should have understood years before.

The vow was never about the Danes.

It was about the counter. It was about being the one who hands out the keys and never keeps one. It was about a girl in a linen closet learning that being useful was how you were allowed to stay in the room, and a woman who'd built her whole life on that lesson and called it strength.

He hadn't broken the vow.

I had. The morning I walked out my own front doors with my hair down and my hands empty and let a man hold the door for me. I had broken it myself, and I'd been trying to blame him for it ever since because breaking it was so much more frightening than keeping it.

"Yeah," I said. "I hear you."

Izzy stayed the rest of the morning.

We didn't solve anything. That's not what it was for. She ordered food in. We sat on the floor with our backs against the sofa and ate out of styrofoam containers like we were twenty-five again and had nothing. She did not once ask me to be smooth, and I did not once reach for something to hold.

And not one single time did I get up to go look out the window.

I told myself it was because he'd asked me not to.

But the truth, the one underneath, the one I'd have had to be very quiet to hear, was that I didn't need to look anymore.

Whatever was out there past the glass—coming or watching or waiting—I wasn't going to face it the way I'd faced everything else in my life. Alone, with something in my hands, being good about it.

Because there was a man in this now. A big, quiet, maddening man who had walked into my lobby with nothing and looked at me like I was worth the wait, and who had put a pistol in the back of his pants and walked out my door toward the danger instead of away from it. He hadn't promised me he was coming back. But he'd left something behind him in that hallway that I could feel in the room even with him gone—the fact of him. The knowledge that for the first time in my life, whatever came, I wasn't going to meet it by myself.

I had Izzy back, the real way, for the first time in a long time.

And I had Clint.

Whatever that turned out to cost me—and I already knew it was going to cost me—I had him. I wasn't alone in it anymore.

That was the thing I'd sworn would never happen.

And sitting on my own floor in the afternoon light, with my best friend beside me and a locked door between me and the world, I found I couldn't be sorry for it. Not one bit.

20

CLINT

Idon't remember crossing the courtyard.

There was the doorway, and the man in it, and then nothing—no steps, no distance, no decision. Then, my father's arms around me, and mine around him, the two of us standing in the door of a castle holding on like men in a river.

He was real. That was the first report my body filed. Real, and solid, heavier than the man who'd walked away down the caliche. His hand came up and gripped the back of my neck the way it did when I was a boy and had done something right. A sound came out of me that I'd never made before.

"Clint," he said. Into the side of my head. Rough. "Clint. Son."

So many years.