Page 24 of Warrior Security
“He’s been asking about you.”
The field around me went very still. The breeze that had been pushing through the grass dropped. Duchess tossed her head at the far fence, but I barely registered it.
“Why would Carter be asking about me?”
“I think he’s reflecting, Eleanor. Going through something like this makes people look back. He cared about you very much.”
“He’s the reason I have a scar on my arm, Mother.”
I kept it deliberately unemotional. Said it the way I’d say it was Tuesday. The sky was blue. Water was wet. Carter Hollis had done that.
The silence on her end lasted four seconds. I counted.
“Every marriage has its difficulties. I’m not saying what happened between you was?—”
“I came to your house bleeding, and you told me I was being difficult. You told me to go back to him. I had to drive myself to the emergency room for stitches because my own parents wouldn’t help me.”
“That’s not exactly?—”
“Thatisexactly what happened.”
Another silence. Longer. When she spoke again, her voice had cooled by several degrees, the way it always did when the conversation stopped being something she could manage.
“I didn’t call to argue, Eleanor. I called because I care about you, and I thought you should know about Carter.”
“You called because Carter asked you to.” His parents and my parents had been best friends as long as I could remember. That was evidently still true, despite everything.
“That’s not fair.”
“I think it’s very fair. I think you haven’t picked up the phone in six years, and the first time you do, his name is in your mouth. You can care about Carter all you want, Mother. But you don’t get to put his name in my ear and call itconcern for me.”
I heard her breath. A small, tight inhale that meant I’d landed somewhere she didn’t want me to be. In another life, a younger version of me would have softened. Apologized. Found a way to smooth it over so that she could hang up still believing the version of events that let everyone sleep at night.
“I should go,” I said. “I have work to do.”
“Eleanor—”
“Goodbye, Mother.”
I hung up. Lowered the phone to my side.
The field was still there. The fence, the paddock, the mountains beyond the tree line. Duchess had gone back tograzing. Everything exactly where it had been fifteen minutes ago.
My hands were shaking.
I pressed them flat against my thighs and held them there. The tremor worked its way through my fingers, my wrists, the tight muscles of my forearms, and I held them still and waited for it to pass. It took longer than I wanted it to.
I didn’t cry. I’d stopped crying about my mother years ago, not because the conversations hurt less, but because I’d finished grieving. The mother I needed had never existed. The one I had would never change.
Once I’d made peace with both of those things, the tears stopped and something quieter had taken their place. Something that lived in my chest and came and went on its own schedule, and couldn’t be fixed by crying or calling or hoping.
I straightened my spine. Rolled my shoulders back. Took one breath, then another. I’d built this place to show others about safety. I might be broke, but I didn’t regret a single second of that.
Still, the call from Mother was going to take a little bit for my nervous system to settle down. A long bit.
On the walk back toward the barn, I cut along the back fence line where the property sloped toward the trees. A cigarette butt sat in the grass near the last post. Smoked down to the filter, ground out in the dirt.
I stopped. Neither Logan nor I smoked. And damn it, nobody else had any business being back here.
