The equipment shed had one exterior door and one interior passage, and both of those access points had heavy bolt locks on this side. He threw both bolts. Then he found the emergency panel on the shed's inner wall, a weatherproof box with a hinged cover that he'd noticed during his first property walkthrough, and opened it. Inside was a satellite emergency beacon, a real one, professional-grade, pre-registered, the kind installed on remote properties exactly for situations where conventional communications failed. He activated it.
The device gave a single low tone and a steady amber light. Someone would be coming. Not tonight, not in this storm, but they'd be coming. Cade stood there for a moment with his cut hand and his throbbing shoulder and his heart running faster than he wanted to admit, and he made sure the bolt on the exterior door was thrown all the way before he went back to get Octavia. She was in the wine cellar, sitting on an overturned wooden crate with the headlamp on the floor, angled up toward the ceiling, casting everything in a pale diffused light.
She looked up when he came through the door, and her eyes moved immediately to his hand. You're bleeding, bracket edge. It's not deep. Sit down. I'm fine.
I did not ask you how you were. I said, "Sit down." She was already moving. There was a utility cabinet against the far wall with a first aid kit inside. The kind of well stocked kit that came with properties managed by people who took preparation seriously.
She had it open before he'd fully settled onto the crate. He let her work on his hand. She cleaned it with the brisk efficiency of someone who dealt with worse and wasn't interested in dramatics. pressed a gauze pad against the cut and taped it in place with strips of medical tape applied at precise angles. Luther had someone with him, Cade said.
Shorter man contractor coat. I don't know who that is. There may be more. I don't know. He watched her hands.
She pressed the last piece of tape flat with her thumb and didn't move for a second. I activated the emergency beacon in the shed. Rescue teams will come when the storm clears enough. She looked up close like this with the upward light and the stone walls of the cellar around them. She looked different from how she looked in the rest of the house.
The authority she wore in open spaces the particular posture of someone accustomed to being the most powerful person in any room had settled into something quieter down here. She still had every bit of herself. She just wasn't performing it. Luther has been with me 11 years. She said, I know.
I recommended him for a position on my foundation board 3 years ago. I attended his daughter's graduation. She set the roll of medical tape down on the lid of the first aid kit. I paid for his mother's care facility when she was ill. I didn't ask him to pay it back.
I know, Cade said again. I'm telling you this, she said, not because I want sympathy. I'm telling you because I need to say it out loud to someone. Her voice was flat, deliberate. The way someone talks when they're managing something interior with a lot of effort.
He has been in this house when I was asleep. He has had access to everything I own on this property. And he used it. Cade didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that would make that smaller.
How long has the storm been going? She asked after a moment. He checked his watch. Almost 15 hours. And you haven't slept?
Not really. She sat back on the second crate and pulled her knees up slightly, wrapping her arms around them. It was an unconsciously human gesture, the kind of small, self-contained posture that people fall into when they stop performing for an audience. He didn't think she knew she'd done it. Tell me about Brin, she said.
He looked at her. Why? Because I would like to think about something that isn't this house and that man. She met his eyes steadily. And because you mention her the way people mention things that are the center of their world.
Cade was quiet for a second. He hadn't expected that. She's eight. He said she's paused, searching for honest language instead of the easy kind. She's funny, not in the way kids are funny where adults pretend to laugh.
She's actually funny. She notices things other people miss and then says the truest possible version of what she noticed at the most inconvenient time. He looked at the floor. She's got her mother's eyes exact same color. Sometimes I look at her and it just he stopped.
Her mother, Octavia, said quietly. Four years ago. She was 31. He said it without inflection because that was the only way he'd found to say it without it stopping everything. Aneurysm.
3 days in the hospital. Then she was gone. I'm sorry. Yeah. He turned his hand over and looked at the taped cut.
Brin was four. She remembers her, but not the way an adult remembers. more like impressions. Her voice, the smell of her shampoo, that her laugh was loud. He smiled briefly involuntarily.
Her laugh was really loud. Octavia didn't fill the silence with anything. She just let it sit there. He appreciated that more than she probably knew the number of people who responded to loss with immediate reassurance, as if the point was to close the subject had exhausted him over the years. " I had plans," he said before.
I was going to build the business into something larger. We were going to move. Elena had this whole timeline mapped out. She was a planner. She had spreadsheets for everything.
After she died, he shook his head. The plans didn't fit anymore. The life we'd been building was built for two people. So, I made a different one. One small enough to manage, Octavia said.