Chapter 11: The Cabin

We drove along the lake for two hours with the headlights off the main road and on the gravel.

He kept his word and asked me nothing.

Every few miles he glanced at the mirror.

Once he pulled into a church lot and shut off the engine until a pair of headlights went by.

The cabin stood at the end of a dirt road in the dunes, with a screened porch and a woodstove.

Dawn was grey over the water by the time he unlocked the door.

"It was my father's," he said. "Nobody knows it's mine. It's in my mother's maiden name."

"Does your mother know you're here?"

"She's in Arizona, and she doesn't know about any of this."

"What does she think you do?"

"She thinks I work for the government." He found a lamp. "She's not wrong."

It smelled of cedar and old coffee.

There was one bedroom with a quilt on the bed and one couch with a blanket folded over the arm.

I stood in the middle of the room and did not know where to put my hands.

Finnegan looked at them.

"You pulled the line," he said.

I looked down.

My left wrist had a smear of blood across the white scar where the dialysis tape had torn.

I had not felt it.

"Sit," he said.

He brought a basin of warm water from the kitchen, a clean cloth and a tube of ointment from a first-aid box.

I sat on the edge of the bed.

He knelt on the rug and took my wrist in both hands.

"Tell me if it hurts."

"It doesn't."

He washed the blood from the skin with slow, careful strokes.

His thumb passed over the scar and stopped.

I felt my pulse in his palm.

I looked at the top of his head, at the grey in his hair, and I did not move.

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