Page 83 of Breaking His Exile

Nobody knows my name out here.

Nobody knows your name.

Nessie appeared in the doorway behind her, heading toward the table arrangement she’d left in the yard, and paused.

Jonah materialized on the bottom step with a mug of coffee.

River came around the corner of the barn, stopped, and looked at his sister the way he looked when he forgot to arrange his face first — open and undone by something he hadn’t braced for. He leaned on the porch rail across from Jonah and didn’t say anything. River, who had not stopped talking for more than ninety seconds at a stretch since she’d arrived, went quiet.

She kept playing.

X appeared from somewhere near the barn and stopped at the porch edge, and when she reached the second verse—the unfinished one she’d been roughing out in her head—he opened his mouth and joined in.

“—nobody knows your name,” he harmonized with great confidence.

It was wrong. It was wrong in three different ways simultaneously.

“No,” Jonah said immediately.

“Absolutely not,” River said.

“X,” Nessie said with fond exasperation.

X held up both hands. “I felt something. I was moved.”

“You were off-key,” River said.

“I was⁠—”

“Stop.” Evander’s voice came from the edge of the porch. Rainey hadn’t heard him come up. He stood at the corner post, weight on his good side, and he was looking at X with an expression that left no room for discussion. “Let her play.”

X closed his mouth.

Rainey played through the rest of the unfinished verse, humming where she didn’t have lyrics, feeling her way through until she reached the end of what she had, and let it trail off into something simple and quiet.

Nobody spoke.

She looked at Evander. He’d heard this song in pieces on the mountain, in the spaces between weather and fear. He knew where it had come from.

And although she’d played it in front of everyone else, it still felt like it belonged between them.

By evening the yard had returned to itself — the pines bare of string lights, the grass recovering from the pressed-down evidence of dancing, the tables and chairs gone back to wherever Walker kept them for the next occasion. The bunkhouse lights were on. She could hear the men from the porch, the low register of conversation and someone’s guitar — not hers, someone else’s, probably River — and Kavik howling at something only Kavik could hear.

Boone came out of the barn and found Evander at the fence line. She was on the porch close enough to hear it.

“Men are gathering,” Boone said. No softness in the delivery. Not an invitation so much as a fact being presented. “Half hour.”

Evander said nothing.

Boone waited. He had the patience of a man who’d waited out harder silences and wasn’t particularly concerned about this one.

“I’m not good company,” Evander said.

“Nobody said you had to be.”

Boone walked back toward the bunkhouse. He didn’t check whether Evander would follow.

Rainey watched Evander stand at the fence. She watched him look at the bunkhouse, then at the dark ridge above the tree line — his mountain, visible on clear nights as a mass of shadow against the stars.