Page 41 of Warrior Security
But that wasn’t quite right. Lark didn’t just do things for people. She set things in motion and then stepped back so the person never realized they’d been guided. She never made anyone feel like a project because the whole point was that they didn’t know it was happening until they were already different.
She’d looked at me three weeks ago and seen a man who was too stubborn to accept help and too far gone to survive without it, and instead of telling me what I needed or pressing me to admit what was wrong, she’d put a fifty-five-pound yellow lab in my path and waited.
“Hey,” I said into the dark.
Tova’s tail thumped once against the floor.
“I know what you did. What she trained you to do.”
Another thump.
“I didn’t ask for it.” I stared at the ceiling. “But I’m not giving you back.”
She exhaled through her nose, long and patient, and her tail went still.
I lay in the dark and listened to her breathe.
The quiet in the cabin was different now. It wasn’t the crawling kind I usually had from a nightmare that sent me outside to walk the fence line and scan the perimeter and catalog everything that might be wrong.
It was the kind that had something in it. A dog breathing on the floor beside my bed who would be on my chest before my conscious mind registered the next dream, who would hold me down with her weight and her warmth until my body remembered where it was and my hands and brain unclenched.
I closed my eyes. I thought about a woman who’d been quietly saving me since the day she handed me a flyer in a coffeeshop and hadn’t asked for a single thing in return except that I fix her fences.
I was going to do more than that. I didn’t know exactly what or how. I just knew I was going to help Eleanor “Lark” Monroe the way she’d helped so many people.
The little bird wasn’t alone anymore.
Tova breathed. I breathed.
And I slept.
Chapter 13
Logan
I’d been at Lark’s house since six that morning, crouched on the floor of her utility closet with a flashlight and a multimeter while she hovered behind me in the doorway with a coffee mug in her hand. She’d watched me work with the expression of a woman who’d already written the eulogy.
But the heater wasn’t dead. The tank was solid, no corrosion, no leaks. The thermocouple had failed, which meant the gas valve thought the pilot light was out and shut everything down. The heating element was corroded at the base, probably original to the unit. Two parts and maybe an hour of work once I had them.
Thanks to Uncle Sam for providing me with some actually useful skills.
I’d had to come into town to get the thermocouple. It was a standard part, and Murphy’s had it on the shelf. The heating element took longer. The man behind the counter disappearedinto the back room and came back with three boxes before we found the right model.
“Should do it,” he said, setting the element beside the thermocouple. “Anything else?”
“Pipe thread sealant and a roll of Teflon tape.”
He gathered them from the pegboard display while I waited.
Six weeks of barn showers because nobody had looked at the damn thing, including me for the first three weeks I’d been here. That should be a federal crime.
“That’ll be twenty-three fifty,” the man said.
I paid and was putting my wallet away when the front door groaned open behind me.
“I swear that door gets worse every time.” Beckett walked in with a coffee cup and sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. He spotted me, and his face opened up. “Logan. Twice in one month at Murphy’s. You’re basically a local now.”
“Hey, man. Just picking up parts.”
