Page 21 of Devoured

"Lara."

In that voice — low, rough at the edges, the one he'd used in the kitchen the night of the stroke and had not used to her again since. It went down her spine and sat low in her belly, and she had about half a second to lock her face against it before she turned.

She turned, and they were closer than she'd realized, he'd come up the gravel quietly the way he did, and the morning had stripped both of them down to whatever was under their usual faces, and for one beat in the parking lot of Elena's clinic with the sun white overhead they just stood there, looking at each other, neither of them quite ready to have whatever conversation they were about to have. He had dust on his neck where his collar had pulled away from his skin. She noticed and looked away from it. He noticed her notice, and the line of his jaw did something small.

"He's going to be okay, Elena said⁠—"

"Yeah. I heard." He shifted his weight, looked at the keys in her hand, looked back up. "Listen. The vet's coming out in an hour. I need the file for the bay mare's last bloodwork — last spring, maybe February. Should be in one of the bottom drawers. It'll be in with, I don't know what. Somewhere in there. It was Dad's filing. You'll know where it isn't before you know where it is."

"Bay mare. Bloodwork. February." She nodded. "I'll find it."

"I owe you for today."

"You don't owe me. Helen drove. I drove for Helen."

"You drove because Helen would have been too proud to ask." He said it flat, the way he said anything that mattered. He was close enough that she could see the small fine sun-lines at the corners of his eyes when he met hers, the same gold-shot brown that had hit her in the back of the knees on the porch a month ago, and she felt the small unwise warmth of being seen by him settle in a place she'd been pretending wasn't there.

He didn't move. Neither did she.

"I'll be in around six," he said, lower than he'd said the rest. "Find the bloodwork."

"Six."

"Lara—"

She waited.

He didn't finish. Whatever he'd been about to say got put back behind his teeth, the way most things he said to her did. He settled his hat instead, and she watched the brim come down over those eyes and was almost relieved to lose them.

"Six," he said again, and walked to his truck.

She watched him go for one beat longer than she needed to, the way she always watched him go, and then she got in her own truck and drove back to the office and didn’t think about the way he had said her name when he stopped her.

That was the rule now. She didn't think about it. She just felt it and drove.

She started at the bottom drawer on the left, because of course she did.

The bay mare's bloodwork was not in the bottom drawer on the left. It was not in the bottom drawer on the right either, where the vet records had been, until somebody had decided they belonged with the insurance, which was in a different drawer, which was in fact the drawer with the Burchall folders, and somewhere between the second drawer down and the third folder back Lara found the Hendricks tax receipts from 2019 and made a small note for herself in pencil to deal with those later because they were not where they should be and nothing in this office was where it should be and she was, she registered with a small clean unsentimental satisfaction, slowly and methodically dragging it into a shape that made sense.

She liked this. She had not let herself say so out loud, because it would sound mad, she liked taking other people's chaos apart and putting it back together so it sat where it belonged. She always had. It was the thing she was best at in the world and the world had mostly thought of her as administrative for it.

She found the bay mare's bloodwork inside the Burchall folder. Of course she did.

It had not been filed in the Burchall folder. It had been stuck to the inside of the back cover, by the kind of accidental adhesion that happens when a paper-clipped insurance form sits against a stack of other documents for nine months in a dry climate. The bloodwork came away easily. She set it aside. And then, because she was a person who could not look at a Burchall folder without reading at least the first page — could not, biologically, do it, the way some people couldn't watch the lottery numbers come up without checking — she sat down properly in the chair, and she read.

She read the cover letter the way she read everything: slowly, all the way through, the way she'd been taught at her first audit by a man called Halloran who'd told her, on her first day, that ninety percent of what was being hidden was being hidden in plain sight by people who counted on you not reading carefully.

She read it twice.

She got up. She made herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen because her hands needed something to do. She came back. She read the second document. She read the third.

Around page nineteen, in the back half of an attached schedule that wasn't part of the main offer at all — that was, technically, just a clarifying appendix of definitions — she stopped.

She read the paragraph again.

She read it a third time, with her finger tracking along the words like she was twelve.

She put the document down very carefully, the way you put down something you'd rather not pick back up, and she sat in the chair, and she said, out loud, to a room with two sleeping dogs in it and no people, "Oh, Mr. Royston. You sneaky little bastard."