Chapter 4 - The Safe House
Three days later, they were two hundred miles west, tucked into a cabin just outside Boone where the Blue Ridge Mountains cut jagged silhouettes against a gray, autumn sky.
The cabin belonged to an old sergeant major Adrian had served with in Kandahar—a man named Miller who had retired from the service, bought fifty acres of hemlock forest, and spent his days carving duck decoys and drinking black coffee on a porch that overlooked a rushing creek.
"You look like hell, Captain," Miller said on the second morning, sliding a heavy ceramic mug across the scarred pine kitchen table toward Adrian.
"Thanks, Sarge," Adrian muttered, wrapping his hands around the heat of the mug. "How’s Nora holding up?"
"Sleeping," Miller grunted, leaning against the counter and whittling a piece of cedar with a pocketknife. "That wife of yours is tougher than she looks, Sullivan. She walked down to the creek this morning without her boots on just to feel the water. Told me she hadn't heard a single person criticize the way she walked in three years."
Adrian stared out the window. Down by the water, Nora was sitting on a fallen log, her dark hair tied back in a messy knot, wearing one of Adrian’s old PT hoodies that swallowed her frame. She looked smaller out here against the vastness of the mountains, but the hunted, hollow look in her eyes had begun to fade, replaced by something steady and quiet.
"The lawyers called from Raleigh last night," Adrian said.
Miller stopped whittling. "And?"
"The trust is officially liquidated. Mom tried to file an emergency injunction claiming mental incapacity on my part—said my deployment gave me 'post-traumatic paranoia'—but the judge threw it out within ten minutes when my CO submitted my post-action reports." Adrian let out a dry, humorless breath. "Ryan tried to pawn three of Dad’s antique shotguns at a shop in Fayetteville yesterday afternoon. The owner recognized the serial numbers from the estate inventory I filed with the court and called the sheriff."
Miller let out a short, bark-like laugh. "The boy always was about as sharp as a bowling ball. What about Evelyn?"
"She’s staying at a Hampton Inn off Interstate 95," Adrian said. "Her credit cards were declined when she tried to check into the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill. She called my cell phone twenty-two times yesterday. I didn't pick up."
"Good," Miller said, pointing his knife at Adrian’s chest for emphasis. "You spent twelve years letting that woman make you feel like you owed her your life just because she signed a piece of paper when you were eighteen. You’re done paying that tax, son."
May you like
Adrian nodded slowly. He knew Miller was right. But as he watched Nora pick up a smooth river stone and turn it over in her palm, he felt a different kind of weight settling into his bones—the weight of a future that belonged entirely to them.
***
