Page 159 of Shatter

For a second, I think he's going to answer.

Then he picks up his beer, takes one long swallow, and sets it back down, still three-quarters full.

"Thanks." He stands up.

He walks out through the front door, and a minute later, through the window, I watch the taillights of his black Charger pull out through the gate and turn south.

Toward the coast.

Toward Apalachicola.

"What'd he want?" Hakon's voice comes low, right behind me.

His hand lands warm at the small of my back, where it always goes, where it's always gone, and I lean back into it without thinking.

"Bookkeeping advice." I watch the gate slide shut behind Aren's taillights. "About seafood."

Hakon doesn't say anything for a moment.

"The window." He says it low.

"I think so." My eyes stay on the gate.

He lets it go.

He slides onto Aren's empty stool and hooks a boot around the leg of mine and pulls me an inch closer, until our knees touch.

He's wearing his new cut.

Six weeks old, and the leather's still stiff, still dark, the full Raiders colors stitched across his back where the prospect patch used to be.

Inside it, over his heart, where nobody can see unless he opens it, there's a patch the size of my palm.

I stitched it myself, with Tindra's sewing kit and three nights of pricked fingers.

It says Annika.

Across the bar, my own vest hangs on the back of the chair where I left it, small and soft and new.

Property of Hakon, in curving white letters across the back.

Both ways, I told him, the night Tor handed him his patch.

Both ways, or not at all.

He said yes before I finished the sentence.

"Walt called." Hakon's thumb draws a slow circle on my knee. "He wants to know if we're still coming for Thanksgiving."

"Did you tell him yes?" I tip my head back to look at him.

"I told him you'd make the pie." A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. "He's already bragging to his neighbor."

I laugh, and he watches me do it the way he always does, like he's never going to get used to the sound.

The jukebox changes songs.

Sigurd shrieks with delight somewhere behind us.

Hakon leans in until his forehead touches mine.

"Kom hjem." He says it soft, for me and nobody else. "Come home with me, Annika."

Home.

The little rented house on Meridian Road with the sticky back door and the kitchen big enough for two people to bake in, if they don't mind bumping hips.

The frame on the dresser with Mormor on the porch steps and the old man with his black Lab.

Behind them both, folded into eighths, a single sheet of paper with a city at the top of the world printed on it.

Not yet.

But soon.

I slide off the stool and take his hand.

His fingers lace through mine, rough and warm and certain, and he doesn't let go all the way to the door.