“It’s code for ‘you’re not getting arrested, and Leo DeGrance will personally destroy anyone who tries.’” She tilts her face up toward me. “He also said he’s coming to visit next month.”
“Here? To the cabin?”
“He wants to see the restaurant. And meet Cavall, apparently. I made the mistake of sending him pictures.”
“Which ones?”
“The one where Cav is wearing the chef’s hat.”
“You put a chef’s hat on my dog?”
“He looked distinguished.”
I tighten my arm around her. “Your father’s going to hate the cabin.”
“He’s going to love the cabin.”
“It’s small.”
“It’s rustic.”
“It’sintimate.” She tips her wineglass toward me. “Besides, he’s staying at a hotel. I already booked it. He doesn’t need to know you only own four plates.”
She laughs, and the sound carries across the porch and into the trees, and I think about how not too long ago I was in a cage with blood on my hands and a knife pointed at me by a kid I tried to save, and now I’m arguing about plates with the woman I love while a one-eyed stuffed duck guards the bedroom.
Dr. Chavez would call this progress.
I call it everything.
Genevieve
I wake up to an empty bed, which isn’t unusual.
Lance still runs at four a.m. The nightmares are less frequent now—down from every night to maybe twice a week, but the running stays. Dr. Chavez says the hypervigilance will fade in its own time. I don’t push. I just make sure there’s coffee when he gets back, and that the new French press is loaded and ready, because if I have to drink one more cup from that ancient drip machine, I’m committing a crime.
Whatisunusual is the smell.
Cavall is gone, his bed empty, Virgil abandoned on the blanket. The cabin smells like…
I inhale.
Butter. Toast. Something that might be eggs or potentially a kitchen fire. It’s hard to tell with Lance.
I grab a sweatshirt and pad down the hall.
He’s at the stove.
Shirtless, because he doesn’t own enough shirts and also because he knows what it does to me and weaponizes it daily. His sweats are slung low on his hips. Cavall is sitting at his feet, watching the pan with an intensity that suggests he’s been promised a share.
There are two plates on the counter. He’s arranged toast on them in a way that’s almost geometric, like he’s been thinking about plating the way I showed him. There’s a bowl of fruit that’s been cut with the precision of a man who learned to handle knives in a very different context. And the French pressis full.
“Morning,” he says without turning around.
“Are you cooking?”
“Attempting.”
I lean against the doorframe. “What is it?”