Page 76 of The Drifter

"You're family," he said. "Family drives."

The thing at the bottom of the steps was a Maserati the color of wet slate, and it had more horses in it than half of Texas.

I'm a walking man. I'd defend it in court. But there's a thing nobody tells you about a walking man, which is that he loves a wheel the way a sailor loves a porch. I came up driving ranch trucks with three hundred thousand miles on them and steering play you could measure in inches. The first time I put my foot down in that Italian animal and felt it gather up under me like a cutting horse, I laughed out loud, alone, at nothing, with the harbor going by beside me in sheets of light.

Two reasons I left Dominion Hall.

The first was plain. There was nothing for me to do there. The machine was hunting Craine—screens and signals and men who did that work better than I ever would. My job would come when there was ground to cover. Until they found him, I was furniture in a war room.

The second reason had a name.

I needed to see Sasha. Not wanted—needed, and I'd quit arguing with the word somewhere on the drive. A man finds out that his father is alive, his family is a battalion, and his own blood was drawn up in a government file before he was born—and the one place in the world his feet want to take him is a condo on the water where a woman waits. I drove toward her with my whole chest and didn’t examine it, because I already knew what the examination would find.

Her block came up quiet in the late light.

The beach truck was gone. I marked that before I'd parked—no jacked-up pickup, no cooler, no board shorts. For half a second, something cold went through me.

Then, I saw the Miata.

It was parked across from her building with its top down, a Mazda from the nineties, faded red gone to rose. In it sat an old woman with silver hair and reading glasses and a paperback folded open on the wheel. She had a sweet tea in the cupholder and a church fan on the dash, and she looked like she'd grown there. Like the car had been poured around her. Like she was Charleston itself, sitting out front, taking the air.

She glanced up at me when I crossed the street. The way any old woman glances at any passerby—mild, incurious, already going back to her page.

And I knew.

I couldn't have written the report on how I knew. The glance was flawless. But it had weighed me, and filed me, and dismissed me as friendly, all in the time it took to turn a page. There's exactly one kind of person who can do that through reading glasses. The beach boys had rotated off, and the next shift was a grandmother in a convertible. She was better than they were.

After a day of billions—billions, some fraction of which was apparently mine now, a thought I'd put on a shelf to look later—the notion that my family employed lethal grandmothers didn't even raise my pulse. I gave her a nod she pretended not to see, and went up the steps, and buzzed.

"Yes?" Sasha's voice, through the little speaker, careful and bright and built.

"It's me."

The silence lasted half a breath, and then the built voice fell off hers entirely.

"Clint." The relief came through that cheap intercom like water through a burst pipe. The door lock buzzed before she'd finished my name.

I took the elevator. I watched the numbers climb and my heart climbed with them, same as the first time, and I thought, that's not going to stop happening. Fine. Noted.

She was in her doorway when the elevator opened.

Barefoot, hair loose, standing in the hall with her arms already lifting. We came together in the middle of the corridor and collided. I got my arms around her and picked her up off the floor and she wrapped me up, legs and arms and face buried in my neck. I stood there in a hallway holding the whole warm weight of her while something in my chest reset itself like a bone going back in its socket.

She didn't ask.

That was the thing. She had spent a day behind two locks and no word since. She had every right on earth to demand the report the second she saw me. She just held on. She held on and breathed against my neck and let me be back before she asked me to be anything else. I felt myself go further down into whatever I was falling into. A woman who has spent her life reading people knows the difference between a man who needs to be questioned and a man who needs to be held. She'd read me from a doorway.

I carried her inside. She reached back and threw both locks without letting go of me.

We ended up on her sofa, her curled against me, and I told her what I could.

Not all of it. Trueborn wasn't mine alone to hand over, and half the rest was still settling in me like silt in a stirred pond. But I told her the spine of it. That the trouble was real, and was a man, and that my family was handling it.

And I told her the thing that mattered.

"My father's alive."

She went still at my side.