Page 14 of Devoured

"Mm-hmm."

"It is."

"I'm sure." Pearl was not sure. Pearl had never been less sure of anything in her life and was enjoying it enormously. "Marge!" she called again. "Bring her the pecan."

"I didn't order pie."

"Marge!"

Marge came out of the kitchen wiping her hands, took one long assessing look at Lara, the kind of look that started at the face and went somewhere deeper and came back having reached a verdict, and set a slice of pecan pie down in front of her with the gravity of a woman laying a cornerstone.

"You're too thin," Marge announced. "You're doing too much and eating standing up. I can tell." She tapped the plate once. "Eat that. All of it." And went back into the kitchen, the matter settled.

"She doesn't bring pie to just anyone," Pearl said, with the significance of a town crier. "I hope you understand what's happening here."

Lara looked at the pie. It was, she suspected, an extraordinary pie. Everything Marge made was extraordinary. She picked up the fork because there was plainly no other way out of the building.

"What's happening here," she said, "is that two women I met a week ago have decided to fatten me up and marry me off, and I'd like it on the record that I see exactly what you're doing."

Pearl beamed at her, openly, with her whole sharp face, like Lara had passed a test she hadn't known she was sitting.

"Oh, honey," she said, delighted. "Nobody said anything about marrying you off." A beat, perfectly timed, the pecan pie steaming between them. "But you cannot let that man hire another nanny without telling us first. We've got reputations to maintain."

The thing was, Lara kept thinking, driving the pie tin back out to the ranch with the windows down and the radio playing something with too many fiddles in it — the thing was, she had a whole airtight case built about Dean Royston, and the case kept springing leaks.

The case was this: he was an arrogant, cold, dismissive man who had looked at her shoes and her city neatness and written her off inside two minutes, and that was a kindness, really, because a man like that was a man she was safe from. She'd built the case on the porch the first day and reinforced it every day since, and it had been holding beautifully right up until it stopped.

Because it didn't account for the crusts cut off a sandwich. It didn't account for the note in the lunchbox in a big careful hand. It didn't account for a man who came home grey and wrung out from a hospital and said thank you like the word had to be dug up out of him. It didn't account for the way he'd looked at her this morning across his own kitchen, before he caught himself, like she was something he hadn't budgeted for and couldn't afford and wanted anyway.

That was the part she couldn't get the case to cover. Cold men were easy. She had a PhD in cold men; she'd dated the whole syllabus. What she had no defense against, had never once had a defense against, was a cold man with something warm running underneath that he was working that hard to hold down. Because then the wanting stopped being about him and started being about whether she could be the thing that got under the wall, and that, that exact wanting, was the one that had wrecked her every single time.

He insulted your shoes, she reminded the traitor in her chest. He called you a gold-digger on day two.

The traitor was unmoved. The traitor had seen him in the doorway this morning, and the traitor had filed it under evidence, and there did not seem to be a thing Lara's good sense could do about it.

In the afternoon she took Levi out to the swing set behind the house, because he'd done his reading sheet without being asked and informed her this entitled him to a push, citing precedent, and she found she could not argue with the logic or, increasingly, with Levi.

She was pushing him, higher, he kept demanding, higher, with the bloodthirst of the very small, when she felt it, the weight of being watched, and looked up.

Dean was at the corral fence across the yard, a coiled rope forgotten in his hand, and he wasn’t looking at the horses.

For a second neither of them did anything about it. The boy went up and came back, up and back, shrieking. The afternoon held still around the two adults at either end of it. And Lara, who had spent her whole life being the one who looked away first, who smoothed things over, who handed people the easy exit before they had to ask — Lara held his eyes across the dusty yard and did not look away, and watched, with a small fierce private satisfaction she would be ashamed of later, Dean Royston break first. He turned back to the horses like they'd called him. The line of his neck had gone tight.

There, she thought, absurdly, pushing the swing. There. You felt that too.

It was the most dangerous thought she'd had since Boston, and she knew it, and she let herself have it anyway, just for the length of one more push.

"HIGHER," roared Levi, and she obliged.

The kids went down without much fight, worn out by the day, and the house emptied into the particular quiet that came after, the dishwasher running, the dogs sighing, the wide dark pressing at the windows the way it did out here, total and listening.

Lara was packing up the office to go when Helen found her in the doorway.

"You don't have to do this, you know," Helen said. She had a dishtowel over her shoulder and the loose, undone look of a woman at the very end of a long day. "Any of it. The kids. The breakfast. You were hired for the books. Nobody would think less of you for handing the rest of it straight back."

Lara thought about the honest answer, which was complicated, and the easy answer, which was a lie, and landed somewhere she hadn't planned.

"I know," she said.