Chapter 6

The truck doesn't come back the next day.

It doesn't come back the day after that either, and by the third morning I've almost convinced myself Renata was right the first time — somebody's mailbox, somebody's wrong turn, nothing that has anything to do with us.

Almost.

Wells doesn't relax the same way. I notice it in small things — the way she's started sitting closer to the bay door instead of the back office, the way her bucket has migrated again, another six feet, until she's close enough to see the gravel drive without being seen from it. She hasn't said a word about the truck since it passed. She hasn't needed to. I've learned enough of her sideways language by now to read it in where she puts her body.

Piper notices too, in her own way. She's started sleeping with her boots on — the ones Renata gave her that first night — and when I catch her at it she just shrugs, like it's obvious, like of course you keep your boots on when something in the air has changed and nobody's told you what yet.

I don't correct her. I understand the impulse better than I'd like to.

Renata, for her part, keeps the garage running like nothing's different, which I've come to understand is its own kind of vigilance.

She doesn't hover. She doesn't ask Wells if she's all right, doesn't ask Piper why the boots, doesn't ask me why I've started sleeping lighter than I did the first two weeks I was here. She just makes sure the bay doors are the kind that lock from the inside, makes sure the flashlights all have batteries this time, small unspoken preparations dressed up as ordinary maintenance.

Three days of ordinary can feel very long when everyone in a building is quietly bracing for it to end.

I catch myself, some of those long ordinary hours, doing the same math I did lying on my cot the first week I got here — three women and a garage, a pregnancy nobody outside these walls knows about yet, a truck that might be nothing or might be the first thread of everything unraveling.

My hand finds my stomach the way it always does when I let my mind wander somewhere unguarded, and I think, not for the first time, that whatever's coming down that road isn't going to care that I'm not ready for it. Nothing that's happened since I left Marcus's kitchen has waited for me to be ready.

"You're doing the thing," I tell her one evening, when the garage has gone quiet and Piper's asleep in the room Renata gave her and Renata herself is somewhere out back doing whatever Renata does with an engine that doesn't run anymore.

"What thing."

"The thing where you watch the road instead of whatever's actually in front of you."

She doesn't answer right away. She's cleaning a wrench that doesn't need cleaning, turning it over in her hands like the motion itself is doing some work the silence can't.

"I had a sister," she says, eventually, and it comes out so plainly, so without ceremony, that it takes me a second to understand she's actually telling me something instead of deflecting. "Younger. Not by much. Two years."

I don't say anything. I've learned that much from her too — you don't reach for a story like this, you let it come to you at whatever pace it's willing to move.

"We ran together. Both of us hiding the same way you did — small, quiet, careful. Except she wasn't as good at it as I was. She'd forget, sometimes. Laugh too loud. Stand too tall in a room." Wells sets the wrench down, finally, and looks at it instead of me. "I used to tell her to make herself smaller. I thought I was protecting her."

"What happened?"

"A truck." She says it flat, the way you say something you've said to yourself so many times it's worn smooth, no longer sharp enough to cut on the way out. "Not that one. A different one, a long time ago. Wolves who'd heard there was a rogue in the area worth more claimed than left alone. They didn't even want her, particularly.

They wanted whoever she was traveling with. She just wasn't fast enough to not be standing there when they found me instead."

The garage is very quiet. Even the wrench, finally still on the workbench, seems to be listening.

"I got out," she says. "She didn't. I've spent every year since telling myself there was a version of that day where I was faster, or louder, or less careful about hiding what I actually was, and she'd still be here. I don't know if that's true. I know it's the only story I've got."

"I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me," Wells says, before I can find a response that isn't inadequate. "I'm telling you because I watch that road the same way I used to watch every road for three years after, and I don't know how to stop, and I think you're the only person here who'd understand that instead of trying to talk me out of it."

"I'm not going to talk you out of it."

"I know. That's why I told you."

I think about Piper, asleep two doors down, still flinching at closing doors, still learning what safe is supposed to feel like from a woman who broke her own three-year silence to catch her mid-shift. I think about the way Wells positioned herself nearest to Piper that morning before anyone else moved, faster than instinct should allow for someone so still the rest of the time.

"You've been watching over her," I say. "Piper. Since the day she got here."

"Someone should." Wells's voice doesn't change, but something in her shoulders does, some old weight shifting to a place slightly easier to carry. "I couldn't get it right the first time. Doesn't mean I don't know how, now.

Just means I know exactly what it costs to get it wrong."

Renata finds me later, after Wells has gone quiet again, gone back to the particular stillness she wears like other people wear a coat.

"She told you," Renata says. Not a question.

"Some of it."

"That's more than she's told me in a year." Renata leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching Wells's silhouette through the office window where she's taken up her post again, watching the drive. "You know what that means."

"That she trusts me."

"That she's decided you're worth the risk of being known by." Renata's mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "That's not the same thing as trust yet. But it's the door trust walks through, eventually, if nobody rushes it."

I think about the cord I'm not wearing anymore, the knife Piper held like a gift instead of a threat, the bucket that keeps migrating closer to the door one careful foot at a time. None of it looks like the pack I ran from. All of it, somehow, is starting to feel like one anyway.

"The truck," I say. "Do you think it's coming back?"

Renata doesn't answer right away, and when she does, there's something careful in it, the same carefulness I've started to recognize as her particular way of telling the truth without making it heavier than it needs to be yet.

"I think," she says, "whatever's coming, it's not going to announce itself twice before it decides to actually arrive."

I sit with that a while after she's gone back out to the yard, turning it over the way Wells turned that wrench over — not because it needs turning, but because the motion is doing work the silence can't.

Whatever this is building toward, I don't think any of us believe anymore that it's nothing. I just don't know yet whether we're bracing for a reckoning or a rescue, and some nights I suspect the difference depends entirely on who's driving.

I think, too, about Marcus, though I try not to let myself linger there long. Whether he's still leaving two mugs out some mornings out of habit he hasn't broken yet. Whether Daniel found anything on whatever road he's been sent down, or whether Marcus is still standing in that kitchen deciding what to do next the way he decides everything — fast, certain, and alone. It's strange, missing the shape of a life I chose to leave. I don't regret leaving it. I just haven't figured out yet how to stop carrying pieces of it with me.

Outside, the light's gone the particular gray it goes right before dark, the gravel drive empty, ordinary, and none of us are fooled by how ordinary it looks anymore.