I'm heading down. She set the pen down. Your hand. I'll get it looked at in town. And the shoulder.
And the shoulder. She looked at him for a moment. Then she moved around the table and crossed the room and stopped a foot away from him and held out her hand. A handshake offered with the same directness she gave everything. No hesitation, no performance.
He shook it. Her grip was firm and her eyes were steady and the handshake lasted exactly as long as it needed to and not a second longer. " Thank you," she said, "for all of it," he nodded. " The heating system," she said. Something small moved at the corner of her mouth.
You should finish it when you can get back up here. When the road is properly clear, "That was always the plan," he said. " I'll leave the access code the same." He nodded again. There was more to say.
There was obviously more to say. And they both knew it, and neither of them said it. Because standing in the doorway of a library in a wrecked estate at 1:00 in the afternoon with a sheriff's deputy waiting in the hall was not where any of it belonged. " Take care of yourself," he said. you as well," she said.
He left. The drive down the mountain was slow and white knuckled, the deputy's vehicle grinding through snow that the plow had moved to the sides, but hadn't fully cleared, and the drop offs on the passenger side looking exactly as serious as they always did. Cade sat in the back with his arm braced against his side and his burned hand in his lap, and watched the mountain go past the window, and thought about almost nothing for the whole 16 miles. When they reached Hollow Ridge proper and the deputy pulled up to the medical clinic on the main street and told him they'd prefer he get assessed today rather than later. Cade said yes without argument.
He sat in a clinic waiting room for 40 minutes and then a doctor pressed on his shoulder in the same place as the paramedic had and confirmed a partial AC separation, taped him into a sling, dressed his hand, and told him no heavy lifting for 3 weeks. Then she looked at him over the top of her glasses and said, "I know what 3 weeks means to a one-man operation." " I'm telling you anyway." " I know," he said. " Thank you."
He called Renata from the clinic parking lot. " I'm in town," he said when she picked up. " How's Brin?" " She's fine, Cade. She's been fine."
A pause. " She's been asking about you since yesterday morning." " But fine. You know how she is. She doesn't make a production out of it.
She just asked once every 30 minutes with extremely casual phrasing. He smiled despite himself. I'll come get her. She's at school. I took her this morning.
The roads are okay down here. Another pause. Cade, what happened up there? The news is saying something about an arrest at a private estate on the San Isabella. I'll tell you later, he said.
Are you actually okay? He looked at the sling on his arm, the taped hand. the view of Hollow Ridge's Main Street, which looked exactly as it always did, ordinary and small, and exactly where he'd chosen to be. " Yeah," he said. " I'm okay."
He picked Brin up from school at 3:15. She came through the side door with her backpack hanging half off one shoulder and a piece of paper in her hand, and stopped when she saw him leaning against the truck. Her face did something fast and complicated relief, and then the effort to make the relief look casual, which she managed about as well as an 8-year-old could manage it, which was not well at all. She walked up to him and looked at the sling. " What happened to your arm?"
She asked. " Hurt my shoulder." " It's okay. Is that why you didn't come home last night?" " Part of it.
Also, the storm trapped me up on the mountain." She processed this. " Then were you scared?" He crouched down, which pulled at his shoulder in ways he was going to ignore, and looked at her directly a little bit. Yeah.
Brin considered this seriously, the way she considered most things not rushing to the next part, actually sitting with it then. But you were okay. I was okay. She nodded. Then she held up the piece of paper she was carrying the school project, the poster section he'd promised to help with.
It was already finished. colored markers, careful lettering, a handdrawn diagram in the center that was better than he'd expected from someone who insisted she couldn't draw. Renata helped, Brin said. I told her what went where, and she did the background because I didn't have time. It looks good.
It's okay. She shrugged with the one shoulder that wasn't occupied by the backpack. You can look at it properly when we get home. He stood up. He opened the passenger door and she climbed in and he went around to the driver's side and got in carefully and she sat with a poster board across her lap and looked out the windshield at the school building. "
Dad," she said. " Yeah." " Were you alone up there?" He looked at the road ahead. " No," he said. "
I was working on a client's house." " She was there." Brin looked at him sideways, the look she had when she was deciding how to ask the next question. " Is she nice?" Cade thought about how to answer that with any accuracy.
She's not what most people would call nice, he said. She's direct. She's smart. She was in a hard situation and she handled it better than most people would. Brin absorbed this.