He looked up. She was staring at the shelf, at the battered paperback with the broken spine.
“Steinbeck,” he said. “East of Eden.”
“Huh.” She peeked at him. “Never would have guessed that.”
“What would you have guessed?”
“Something military. Sun Tzu.” A pause. “Tom Clancy.”
“I’ve read both.” He flexed his left hand, full extension. “Steinbeck’s in a different class.”
She glanced at him over the rim of her mug. Something in her expression was doing a careful, complicated calculation—the same look she’d always gotten when she was sketching someone and finding more than she’d expected to. He’d been on the receiving end of it before. It never got easier.
“Why here?” she asked. “I always thought you’d stay in Billings. Go back to your hometown.”
“Too many people there know what happened.” He said it plainly, without bitterness. It was just a fact. “This place is clean, and my dad doesn’t use the cabin anymore.”
“I love Montana,” she said. “I kept telling myself it was because of the summers with my grandparents.” She glanced toward the window. “I think I needed somewhere that felt like it existed before everything went wrong.”
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say, and anything honest would open a door he wasn’t ready to open when he was running on no sleep and a fresh death notification.
He downed his coffee, got up, and refilled his cup.
He returned to the table, and she reached over and took it, tugging the mug to her. She didn’t ask, and it seemed to dawn on her suddenly. Hers had cooled; his was the perfect temp. She just took it, the way she’d always done, with the ease of someone who’d learned the habit so long ago.
“Sorry,” she said, sliding it back over to him. “Old habit.”
He got up, placed hers in the microwave for a reheat, then topped it off with some fresh coffee without a word.
When the cup landed in front of her, she peered up at him with a sheepish expression. The kitchen was small, the table was smaller, and he hadn’t thought about the geometry of it until he was there, looking down at her with only mugs of coffee between them. The dawn was coming in through the window, and that expression on her face was so…familiar.
His pulse did a jagged beat. He stepped back, sat, and put the table between them where it belonged.
Too late, said something in his chest. Entirely too late.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
He nodded. Picked up his own mug and stared at table.
Silence descended again for a while, and it wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t the weighted silence of earlier. It was the tense quiet of two people who had once known how to be in a room together and still remembered the shape of it, even if everything else had changed.
The sat phone buzzed on the counter. Claire’s check-in was scheduled for oh-six-hundred. She was early, which meant she had information she hadn’t wanted to sit on.
Mack got up and answered, turning his back to the table as if that afforded him privacy in this tiny kitchen.
The update was largely what he’d expected. The FBI safe house was confirmed, but it was still forty-eight hours out. The roads were still a mess, and it was doubtful secondary access roads like the one they needed to get back to the highway would be passable before late afternoon. That helped keep the cartel activity hampered but not deterred.
And Blake was still unaccounted for.
Then Claire’s voice changed. She used his SPS codename. “Hawk.” A pause with something in it. “Does Ms. Bennett know about her roommate?”
“No.”
“She needs to. She might try to contact her again.”
“I know.”
“Mack.” Quieter. His name this time. “I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, she couldn’t have known this would happen. You couldn’t have, either.”