Page 29

I look at the clock on her stove. 9:40. The ringing hasn't come back.

"Dale texted," I say. "Before dawn. Work. I should call him."

She doesn't miss a beat. "Of course. Go. I'll keep the eggs warm."

It's the right answer. She has heard work and decided to be easy about it. I take my coffee and kiss her once, quick and hard, on the temple, and go.

My kitchen is half-empty. Boxes along the wall, a bookshelf with nothing on it, one chair, one lamp. I stand where I always stand, against the wall that isn't mine, and I dial.

"Mercer."

Dale Kessler picks up on the second ring. He's a man who runs an operations desk the way other men run a marathon, fast and with no wasted breath.

"Sorry about the weekend. Garza snapped his wrist on Friday, climbing out of a truck of all things, so the roster's short. Kickoff's moved up to oh-five-hundred Monday. I need you on site tonight."

"Copy. On site tonight."

"Staging yard by midnight. That's a six-hour haul from your place, so you'd have to roll by eighteen hundred. Problem?"

It's the voice I use. I hear myself use it. A flat, level, soldier's voice. The one built for exactly this, stripped of anything that could catch.

"Midnight at the yard, roll at eighteen hundred. No problem."

"Anything holding you in that little town?"

"Nothing," I say. "I'll be there."

"Good man." A pause, a keyboard clatter. "Look, offer's still open on the instructor lead. Marion yard, ninety minutes from you, home every night. I'll keep asking once a quarter till you say yes."

"I know."

"You'd be good at it. Better than the dirt."

"Not now, Dale."

"Your funeral." He's already hung up.

I lower the phone. The kitchen is silent.

I pour the coffee down the sink. I don't remember drinking any of it.

The Marion job is ninety minutes. Home every night. Dale's offered it four times. I've said no four times because staying still feels like holding my breath, and I'm good at the work that moves. I'm good at leaving.

Through the wall, I hear her moving. A cupboard, a plate, the soft scrape of a chair. She's eating breakfast alone. I did that.

I should call Dale back. Tell him I'll take Marion. Ninety minutes is nothing. I could be here for dinner. I could fix the porch railing and the gutter and the third stair from the top that groans.

I pick up the phone. I put it down. I've known her forty-eight hours. That's not enough time to upend a contract, a schedule, a life I signed for in August.

It's enough time to know what her laugh sounds like in the shower. To know she hums when she's happy and goes quiet when she's not. To know that she walked around me in a basement so I wouldn't have to turn my head, and no one has ever done that.

Forty-eight hours, and the ringing is gone.

I pick up the phone again. I scroll to Dale's number. My thumb hovers.

And through the plaster, from the other side of the wall, comes a very small sound. A plate being set down on a counter, very slowly, by hands that don't quite trust themselves.

I put the phone in my pocket and cross the kitchen. Before I reach the door, someone knocks on it.