Chapter 3 - THE HOUSE SHE NEVER SAW
Two hours later, Garrett delivered.
Tyler Kane, thirty-one, commercial electrician. Lived in a rental house in Bridgeport. Drove a blue Silverado with a cracked rear light. Frequented a bar called McNally’s on Archer Avenue most evenings between nine and midnight. Two prior domestic disturbance calls on his record, both closed without charges — which told Rhett exactly what it told him about the willingness of the system to do anything useful about men like Tyler Kane. No known criminal affiliations. No connections to any organization Rhett needed to worry about.
A private citizen. An ordinary man who hit women.
Rhett folded the sheet of paper in half and put it in his inside pocket. He was not going to make a decision about Kane tonight. He was going to make a decision about Kane when his thinking was cleaner — when the specific quality of fury currently running through his system had metabolized into something colder and more useful. He had learned early, and at significant personal cost, that decisions made in the hot center of emotion were decisions you spent years managing the consequences of.
Tonight, he would wait.
Dr. Walsh met him in the hallway outside the suite, her medical bag over one shoulder, her expression the same composed neutrality it always was.
“Three cracked ribs,” she said. “Nothing displaced, but she’ll need to be careful about breathing for the next few weeks. The eye socket is intact — it looks worse than it is. The lacerations are superficial. Bruising across her upper arms and shoulders consistent with being grabbed and thrown. The throat is going to be sore for several days, but there’s no structural damage.” She paused. “She’s been injured before.”
He absorbed this without expression. “There’s older bruising. Some scarring on the forearm.”
“What does she need?”
“Rest, pain management, clean nutrition, and—” Walsh paused again, with the slight hesitation of someone choosing their words. “She should talk to someone. A professional. In time.”
“I’ll arrange it.”
“She’s asking for her phone.”
“Give it to her.”
“She’s also asking—” Walsh’s mouth moved in something that was almost a smile. “She’s asking if she can have a cup of tea.”
Something inside his chest did something it had absolutely no business doing.
“Tell her she can have whatever she wants,” he said.
He waited until Walsh had left, and then he stood outside the closed door for a moment. Behind it was a woman who had been brought here damaged and furious and trying not to show it — a woman who had worked in his house for three years and learned to leave a newspaper out without being asked, who had looked at him with dark eyes and said you’re my employer, not my person, and who was currently in a room in his house asking for a cup of tea.
He raised his hand and knocked twice.
“Come in,” she said.
He pushed the door open and stood in the doorway. She was sitting up in the bed now, pillows arranged behind her, the bedside lamp throwing a warm circle of light that made the damage to her face look somehow less brutal and more human. She’d changed into something from the bag she’d brought — a loose shirt, her hair down for the first time since he could remember. Without the professional severity of how she usually wore it, she looked different. Younger. Or maybe just less defended.
“How are you feeling?” he said.
“Like I got hit by a wall.”
“That’s probably accurate.”
A pause. He didn’t move from the doorway. He was aware, with a precision that surprised him, of the distance between where he was standing and where she was sitting — and of the fact that the distance was appropriate, and that he intended to maintain it.
“You’re going to look for him,” she said. “Tyler. I have information about him.”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
He looked at her directly. “I don’t know yet.”
She held his gaze. She was one of the very few people who could hold his gaze without blinking first, and he had noticed this before, in other contexts, and filed it under interesting without knowing what to do with the file.
“Don’t kill him,” she said.
“I haven’t decided anything.”
“I’m asking you,” she said. “Not as your housekeeper. As me. I’m asking you not to kill him.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want to be responsible for a man’s death. Even that man’s death.”
He looked at her for a long time. The rain moved against the window. Somewhere downstairs, the house hummed with the quiet activity of people who worked for him, who moved carefully around the edges of whatever was happening on the second floor.
“All right,” he said.
She let out a breath, slowly, carefully, with the ribs.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
He pulled the door closed and stood in the hallway, and the feeling in his chest was still there. That same feeling from the floor of her apartment. The same feeling that had made his hands shake.
He stood with it for a moment and examined it. He was a man who valued self-knowledge, because self-knowledge was operational. You couldn’t predict your own behavior if you didn’t know what was driving it.
He knew what this was.
The knowing didn’t make it simpler.
The next morning came gray and cold. The rain finally finished, leaving the city raw. Rhett was up at five, the way he always was, and spent an hour in the basement gym running himself into a state of functional clarity — the only form of peace he had ever been able to manufacture.
By 6:30 he was showered, dressed, at his desk. At 7:15 he went to the kitchen.
Isa was already there.
She was standing at the counter in the same loose clothes she’d slept in, her hair up now, moving with careful deliberation. He could see the ribs in every movement — the small adjustments she was making to protect them. She had found the coffee and was standing with a mug pressed between both hands, looking out the kitchen window at the garden, which was wet and silver in the early light.
He stopped in the doorway.
She heard him anyway. She always heard him. He didn’t know how.
“You shouldn’t be up,” he said.
“I slept twelve hours. I’m up.”
He came into the kitchen and poured his own coffee. She watched him do it, which was a reversal they were both aware of.
“You usually have it waiting,” he said.
“You usually don’t have me in a guest suite with three cracked ribs,” she said.
“Fair.”
They stood on opposite sides of the kitchen island and drank coffee. The morning light shifted. A cardinal appeared on the garden wall and disappeared. He noticed that she noticed the cardinal — the way her eyes tracked it with something complicated, not just pleasure, something underneath that, some private accounting about the fact that she was here, in this house, with coffee, watching birds, and not where she had been yesterday.
“I need to go back to my apartment,” she said. “My things.”
“I’ll send someone.”
“My things are my things,” she said. “I packed them myself.”
“You have three cracked ribs.”
“I’m aware of my ribs.”
He looked at her over the rim of his mug. “I’ll send someone with you. You give the instructions. They carry.”
She considered this. He could see her running the cost-benefit, the way she always ran things — quietly, efficiently, arriving at conclusions other people took twice as long to reach.
“Fine,” she said.
“And you’re staying here,” he said, “until the situation with Kane is resolved.”
“What situation?”
“You agreed not to—” Rhett set his mug down. “You agreed I wouldn’t kill him. I didn’t agree not to do anything. He’ll know he’s being watched. Men like that, when they know someone is watching, become cautious. You’ll be safer here in the meantime.”
She was quiet for a moment, which was not agreement but was not a fight either.
“I have work to do,” she said. “My work.”
“Not this week.”
“Rhett—”
“You have three cracked ribs and a face that looks like a car accident and a man who has hurt you twice who doesn’t know where you are. You’re going to rest for a week. Then we’ll discuss it.”
She looked at him with an expression that moved through about four different things in quick succession. Frustration. A flash of something that might have been gratitude. Then something more settled, more guarded — the expression of someone deciding how much trust they could afford.
“A week,” she said.
“A week.”
She picked up her coffee and went back to looking at the garden. He picked up his and did the same.
May you like
They stood there six feet apart, not talking, and the morning moved around them. It was, he thought, the most comfortable silence he had experienced in a very long time.
By afternoon, the comfort had acquired a complication.
