Page 80 of The Drifter

"That's my family," he said, finally. Careful. "They're there to keep you safe."

And there it was. The cold thing in my chest turned all the way over.

"Keep me safe from what, Clint?"

He didn't answer.

"See, that—" my voice cracked and I let it crack, "—that is the thing. That right there. Nobody asked me if I wanted a woman outside my home, and nobody's going to tell me what she's keeping me safe from, and I am supposed to just—be good about it. Aren't I? I'm supposed to smile and say thank you and not ask, because asking is dangerous, because the knowing is the dangerous part, and God forbid, I actually get to decide anything about my own life."

I heard myself. I heard where it was coming from, the old, deep place, the wound with two names on it—my mother's and mine—and I couldn’t stop it, and I didn’t entirely want to.

"I have spent my whole life," I said, "being the one who handles it. Whatever it is. Blood in a room, a badge at my counter, a folio that needs to disappear. I handle it, and I don't ask, and I'm good about it, and nobody ever once asked me if I wanted to be in the middle of any of it. And I swore—Clint, I swore—that I would never let one of you all the way in, because I have watched what comes in behind you. And I did it, anyway. I let you all the way in. And now there's a woman watching outside my building and I don't even get to know why."

The kitchen was very quiet.

He stood there and took every word of it, and he did not flinch, and he did not go smooth, and he did not reach for me. He let me stand in the middle of my fear with nothing in my hands, the way he'd taught me to stand with nothing on—and that made it worse, somehow, that he wouldn't even give me the comfort of being handled.

"You're right," he said.

I hadn't expected that. I'd braced for the reassurance, the it's under control, the smooth. I got you're right, flat and plain, and it took the legs out from under my anger and left just the fear standing there naked.

"About all of it," he said. "Nobody asked you. That's true, and it's not right, and I'm not going to stand here and tell you it is. You got pulled into something because of me. You didn't choose it. And there's a person outside your door you didn't ask for. All of that's true." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the counter, and I watched him decide to give me the one thing he had, which was the truth. "And I can't tell you everything, because some of it isn't mine to tell and some of it would put more on you than you're already carrying. That's the same thing you've been handed your whole life, and I hate that I'm the one handing it to you now. But I won't lie to you. You're not imagining it. It's real. There's a man out there who's dangerous, and my family is in his way, and now, so are you, a little, because you're near me."

I stood there with my arms wrapped around myself in his shirt.

"How much danger?” I asked. "For me. Real number."

"I don't know."

"That's not⁠—"

"I know it's not an answer. It's the true one. I don't know, and I won't invent one to make you feel better, because you'd know I was doing it, and then, you couldn't trust anything else I said." His jaw worked. "What I know is this. The woman in the car, and the others, they’re the best at what they do. Nothing is getting to you that they don’t allow. And I would burn that whole fortress to the waterline before I let anything touch you. Those two things are as true as anything I've got. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend the danger's zero, because it isn't, and you're too smart to believe me if I did."

I looked at him for a long time.

And the terrible thing—the thing that sat in my chest and would not move—was that none of it helped.

Not because he was doing it wrong. He was doing it exactly right. He wasn't smooth and he wasn't lying and he wasn't handling me. He’d just handed me the truth plain. Every word of it should have been the thing that let me set the fear down.

It didn't touch the fear.

That was what frightened me. Yesterday, Izzy had held my hands and said nearly the same things he was saying now. That I deserved it. That I shouldn't let the vow take it back from me. That I wasn't alone anymore. And I had believed her, and it had worked—I'd felt the knot loosen, I'd spent a gold afternoon doing my own life, I'd gone to bed lighter than I'd been in years.

And then, this morning, it was back. Bigger. And no amount of Clint being good, or Izzy being right, or the sun being out, was making a dent in it.

I thought of a thing I hadn't thought of in a long time.

I was small—young enough to be up past my bedtime, curled against my mother on the sofa with the TV on. Oprah.

A man was on, some expert, talking in that low, sure way that makes a child go still. He was saying that people are the only animals on earth who feel danger coming and talk themselves out of it. That a gazelle at the water gets a bad feeling and it runs, every time, no argument. But a person gets in the elevator with the man who scares her, because it would be rude not to. He'd written a whole book about it. He said the people who lived through terrible things—the ones who got attacked, hurt, worse—so many of them said the same thing after. I had a bad feeling. I knew something was wrong. And I told myself I was being silly.

My mother had gone very quiet next to me. I remember that. I remember she put her arm around me and pulled me in and didn't say anything. I didn't understand then what a woman who'd worked service her whole life, who'd learned to read a room to stay safe in it, might have heard in that.

The feeling. Don't argue the feeling away.

And now, I was doing the exact thing that man had warned about.

A man I loved was telling me it was fine, that he had it handled, that the danger was real but managed—and every reasonable part of me wanted to believe him, because believing him was easier and warmer and meant I got to keep the best thing I'd ever let myself have.