Page 30 of Warrior Security
She hadn’t told me where she’d gone that day. She hadn’t told me anything. But since then, the work had been running harder, the chatter running faster, and the brightness cranked up in a way that took visible effort to maintain. She was carrying something new on top of everything she’d already been carrying, and I wasn’t going to add to the pile with an announcement about a cut fence that might be nothing.
I replaced the wire with a new section, drove the staples in, and walked back toward her.
“Done with your section already?” she asked without looking up. “You’re making me look bad, Stroud.”
“Your section has more posts. I just had wire.”
“Excuses, excuses.” She pulled a staple free and dropped it into the can with a metallic ping. “I’ve been doing this alone for six years, and you show up with your functional muscles and your competence, and suddenly, I’m the slow one.”
“Functional muscles?” I raised an eyebrow.
She smiled. “Don’t fish for compliments. It’s beneath you.”
I picked up the spare hammer and started on the post nearest to her, resetting a staple that had worked loose. We fell into the rhythm of it, her on one side, me on the other, the wire between us.
“How’d you end up in Montana?” I asked. “Long way from anywhere.”
“That was the selling point.” She grinned at me over the fence wire. “I wanted somewhere that required a GPS and a sense of adventure just to find a grocery store. Montana delivered.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Back east.” She pulled the wire taut and held it for me to staple. “New York, originally. A lifetime ago.”
“Eleanor from New York.”
Her hands stopped on the wire. Just for a second, a pause so brief that most people wouldn’t have caught it. Then they started again.
“You heard that.”
“Kind of hard to miss when it came through the speaker.”
She was quiet for three staples. I let the silence sit.
“Eleanor is what’s on my birth certificate,” she said. “Lark is what I go by. What I chose.”
“Your family call you that?”
She laughed, short and sharp. “I’m sure my family would rather die than call me Lark. Eleanor was the only acceptable option for a Monroe of the Upstate New York Monroes.” She said it in a voice that wasn’t hers, clipped and nasal and dripping with the kind of money that made people mean. Then she dropped it and was Lark again. “I actually chose the name as an adult. They don’t know and wouldn’t use it if they did.”
She picked up the wire cutters and moved to the next section. I followed and started on the adjacent post.
There was more behind what she’d said than what she’d actually said. A woman who changed her own name as an adult had a reason for it, and the reason lived somewhere in that sharp laugh and the voice she’d put on that didn’t belong to her. But she’d closed the door, and I wasn’t going to shoulder it open.
We worked through two more sections without talking much. She hummed something under her breath while she drove staples, a song I didn’t recognize, and I held the wire taut andlet the rhythm of the work fill the space the conversation had left behind. The sun was warm on my back and the wind pushed through the grass along the fence line, and for a while, it was just the two of us and the sound of hammers.
She was reaching overhead to loop wire around a tall post, both arms extended, her sleeves pushed back past her elbows when I noticed the scar. It ran along the inside of her left forearm. Four inches long, slightly raised, the skin around it paler than the rest. It wasn’t the kind of mark you got from catching your arm on a fence.
“What happened there?” I kept my voice even. A question, not a demand.
She glanced down at her forearm. Her face didn’t change.
“Asshole ex-husband.”
The words landed flat and hard. She’d been married. To someone who’d left a mark like that on her.
“Recent?”
“No.” She pulled her sleeve down. “Ancient history.”
