Page 112 of Haunt Me

I pace the length of his office, chest tight, trying to find the version of my anger that still makes sense out loud.

“You didn’t even warn me.”

“Would you have listened if I had?” He asks it quiet, not cruelly, just honestly. “Or would you have found some way to talk me out of it before I ever got the chance to try?”

I don’t answer because we both already know.

“I know it’s not mine to hand out,” Knox says, after a long moment. “I know that place was yours, still, on paper and every other way that matters, and I know renting it to somebody else feels like erasing something. I felt the same way at first.”

“Then why the hell did you do it?”

“Because it’s temporary, Sam. A short-term arrangement, month to month, and it’s still your name on the deed. But she needed something better than the motel, and the cottage needed somebody in it.” He shakes his head, something almost rueful in it. “Didn’t expect it to turn into whatever it’s turned into. I didn’t expect Pop to start showing up with fruit and vegetables as an excuse to check up on her.”

“So it’s not permanent. You didn’t sign anything over.”

“No. I never had the right to sign anything over, and I wouldn’t have tried.” Knox meets my eyes, steady now. “I just found someone to pay rent on a house you weren’t using and weren’t planning to. That’s all this ever was on paper. But it isn’t a memorial either. I couldn’t watch you, and that house rot at the same time and not do something about at least one of them.”

The way he says it, worn out and honest instead of defensive, takes some of the fight out of me.

“I met her,” I say finally. “Last night. On the road out by the old lumber yard. I didn’t know who she was until I dropped her off.”

Knox goes very still.

“You didn’t tell her?”

“No.”

“Good.” He exhales, some tension leaving his shoulders. “She doesn’t need that. Not yet.”

“That’s not your call either.”

“No,” he agrees, quieter now. “It’s not. It’s not really yours either, not entirely. It’s hers, once she knows enough to have an opinion about it.”

I sit down finally, dropping into the chair across from his desk like my legs have decided the argument’s over even if the rest of me hasn’t caught up yet.

“I’m not ready for any of this,” I admit.

“I know.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the fact that she’s living there. Sleeping in the house that belonged to Raven. That still belongs to Raven, far as I’m concerned, whether there’s a stranger’s toothbrush in the bathroom or not.”

“You don’t have to do anything with it right now.” Knox’s voice softens, some of the brother I remember from before all of this creeping back into it. “You just have to keep breathing through it. Same as every other hard thing this past year.”

We sit there a while longer, neither of us saying much.

“I’m still angry,” I tell him, eventually.

“I know. You have a right to be.”

“But I don’t hate you for it.”

The muscles in his jaw ease at that. “That’s more than I expected right now.”

I don’t tell him about the bottle in the truck, about how close I came to losing weeks of work over one bad hour on a flooded road. I don’t tell him about the way her voice sounded saying thanks, Wolf, soft through the rain, or the way something in my chest hasn’t fully settled back into place since I drove away from the cabin. I definitely don’t tell him about the sound of my dead wife’s voice in that same truck, sharp and furious and unmistakably real, stopping a bottle before it ever reached my mouth.

Some things I’m not ready to hand him yet.

The anger loosens its grip a little, but it doesn’t disappear. I don’t know if it’s supposed to. I don’t know if there’s a version where I forgive him completely or forgive myself for whatever I felt last night, both the grief and the thing underneath the grief I don’t have a name for yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see that cabin without it costing me something every single time.