Page 10 of Forbidden Protector

I read it upside down. She means me to.

Dog shut in the barn. Who else was there this morning?

Ninety seconds with Wyatt's sentence and she's already taken it past grief and built a question with a list of names behind it.

Not he wouldn’t have. That’s what the county says, and the county says it as a eulogy. Who else was there.

I was there. First name on any honest version of that list, and she turned the page so I’d know she knows it.

She watches my face while I read it. Whatever crosses it, she takes.

Aldridge goes back to his truck to radio Choteau. The ambulance crew stands around waiting on a coroner ninety minutes out who’s already been told over the phone what he’s coming to write down.

While they wait, I walk sixty feet down the road and call John Thompsen. Ten years of habit say he hears it from me or he hears it wrong. He picks up on the second ring.

"It's Holt. Jacob's dead."

And then, because it's John, the rest comes.

The road. The snow. The horse at the home place and the clean line in a snowfield that should have been chaos. More sentences than I've given a living person all week, handed to a phone in another county with the wind trying to take every one of them.

When I turn back, she's watching me do it from beside the truck. She takes it down the way she takes down everything. A man who talks, after all. Somewhere. To someone.

She closes the notebook and comes toward me.

Six feet is where people stop with me. They don't know why they do it. They think it's the size, the hat, the last name. It isn't. It's that I never give the signal that says closer is fine, and most people take the absence for a fence.

She walks through it.

A foot, and she has to look up, and the wind comes down off the Front and takes a strand of hair across her mouth and she leaves it there.

Nobody has stood inside my reach on purpose in two years.

I can see the capillaries broken across her cheekbones from the cold. Motel soap on her, cheap and floral, ridiculous on a woman built out of edges. Her breath comes up between us in the blue light and breaks against my collar. Four inches of movement and I'd have my hand on her.

I have held positions where moving meant dying. None of them cost what this costs.

"Your family's had practice making these look natural."

Quiet. Just for me. Close enough that I feel the shape of it before I hear it.

"I've read one just like it."

She lets it sit. Her eyes go over my face the way they went over the snow, unhurried, cataloguing. I understand she is doing to me exactly what I did to the ground.

"It was ruled exposure too."

I go still before I authorize it. The body does that when the ear catches a thing the mind hasn't run down yet.

One just like it.

She didn't say Jacob's name. She said I've read one, past tense, some other file, some other snow. There's weight on it that has nothing to do with a foreman six hours dead behind us.

Ruled exposure. Which one. Whose.

I've been accused of a great many things by people who were right. I know how that lands. This lands like a round going off somewhere behind me, and I stand in the middle of it and can't give you the direction.

Behind her, they put a sheet over Jacob Mercer.