Page 8 of Rune’s Solace

I moved with him.

I might’ve been a third his size, but he couldn’t get past me without physically moving me, and we both knew he wasn’t going to do that, so I stayed exactly where I was.

That stopped him.

He dragged a hand down his beard and looked toward the trees, and whatever he’d been about to say to get rid of me seemed to leave him.

“Devil sat her down tonight,” he said. His drawl came slower than usual. “Been puttin’ it off. We all been puttin’ it off, tryin’ to be sure before we—” He stopped and started over. “That fella she’s been seein’. Montgomery. Tom Montgomery.”

Something in his face made my stomach drop.

“He’s federal, darlin’. DEA. Has been from the start. Every time he’s been comin’ around, takin’ her to supper, sittin’ with her...” His jaw tightened. “He was workin’ us. Usin’ her to get close.”

For a second I just looked at him.

Then all the little things came at once. Brenda wearing the good perfume she only put on when she was going somewhere with Tom. Humming while she worked. Telling me two weeks ago, almost embarrassed by how happy she was, that maybe she’d finally found a good one.

“She thought he was—”

Horse looked away.

“I know what she thought.” Horse’s jaw worked. And there it was, under the anger, the thing everybody at the compound knew and nobody said out loud, that Horse had had fifteen years to be the one who showed up when he said he would, and hadn’t, and had watched some man in a golf shirt come along and do it instead, had hated it, had run his mouth about it, and now the golf shirt was a badge and that was so much worse than jealousy that he didn’t know where to put himself. “I gotta go get her, Amy. She ran off toward the water and it’s near dark and she ain’t thinkin’ straight.”

“No.” I put my hand flat on his chest. Didn’t push. Just left it there. “Let me.”

“Amy — ”

“Horse. Let me.” I looked up at him, and I made my voice come down soft, because I understood something right then that I don’t think he did. “If you go out there right now, she’s gonna have to hold herself together for you. She’s gonna feel you standing there being everything she couldn’t have while she cries about the man who turned out to be nothing. You’ll make it worse just by being you. You know that. Some part of you knows that.”

He looked at me for a long moment, before his eyes went to the trees again.

“Yeah,” he said finally, rough. “Alright. Yeah.” He stepped back. “You get cold out there, or she… you holler. I’ll be right here on the porch. I ain’t goin’ inside.”

“I know you’re not.”

I left him there and went out across the grass toward the trees, it was getting dark fast, and I found her at the bottom of the yard where the property ran down to the marsh. She wasn’t running anymore. She’d stopped at the old split-rail fence and folded up over it with her arms crossed on the top rail and her face down in them, and she was crying the way people cry when they think nobody’s coming, no sound to it, just shaking with every breath.

I didn’t say anything at first. I just came up beside her and put my hand on her shoulder, light, the way she’d done to me about a thousand times when I first came here and couldn’t stand to be touched but couldn’t stand to be alone either. She knew that hand. She leaned into it without lifting her head.

“I feel like such a damn fool,” she got out. Her accent went thick when she cried, all the vowels gone soft and wide. “Amy, sugar, I feel like the biggest fool God ever made.”

“You’re not.”

“I am. I really am.” She lifted her head then, and her face was streaked and swollen, mascara and all, and she laughed at herself in that awful way that’s worse than crying. “You know what I did? I left my things at his place. Little by little. My good robe on the back of his bathroom door, my coffee in his cabinet ’cause he only ever bought that awful instant, the book I was readin’ on his nightstand.” Her voice broke clean in half. “I was movin’ myself in a piece at a time, thinkin’, thinkin’ this is it, this is the one, I finally get the regular kind of thing other women get. Layin’ my robe out in the house of a man who was writin’ up reports on us the entire time. On me. Everything I told him. Every little thing.”

“I am fifty-three years old.” She scrubbed the back of her hand under her eyes. “I’ve been made a fool of by better-lookin’ men than Tom Montgomery and lived through every damn one of ’em. I thought I was past it. That’s what gets me. I really thought I’d finally found a good one.”

She looked out over the water.

“First man I ever had that showed up when he said he would.”

I didn’t have anything for that.

Then she said, quieter, “And he was a lie. The one that showed up was the lie.”

“That’s on him,” I said. “Every bit of that is on him. Not you.”

I heard everything in that. I heard the man she wasn’t naming, the one back up on that porch who never had shown up, not the way she needed. I heard twenty years in it. And I did the only thing there was to do, which was not try to fix a single bit of it, because none of it could be fixed and she didn’t need me to pretend otherwise.