The PowWow

Jacob was still on the floor with Isaiah when Curtis and I got back, though the couch-cushion fort had evolved in our absence into something with what appeared to be a working drawbridge, engineering that Isaiah explained to us at some length and Jacob received with the same grave attention he gave everything the boy said.

I waited until Isaiah wandered off toward the kitchen in search of a snack before I filled Jacob in.

"Two down," I said, low, once we had a minute. "Deel and Reyes. Clean arrest, no incident."

"Good," Jacob said.

"Byron's still out there."

"I assumed."

I sat down across from him, on the arm of the couch that hadn't been requisitioned into the fort's structural integrity. "There's a wall in Rachel's office. His face on it. Every angle Curtis could find, arranged like a case board out of a movie about a detective who's about to make a career-ending mistake."

Jacob looked at me. Waited, the way he does, for me to finish getting to the actual point.

"She's not looking at anything else," I said. "Today, in that room — Curtis did the work, I did nothing, and she barely looked at either of us. She's got one light on and it's pointed at Byron Hawk and I don't think she's noticed yet how far down that tunnel she's walked."

"You're worried," Jacob said.

"I'm worried."

He considered that for a while, the particular unhurried consideration he gives to things that matter and don't have easy answers. Outside, I could hear Isaiah narrating something to Rebecca in the kitchen, his voice bright and untroubled, a kid's voice doing what kids' voices do.

"Wait," Jacob said finally.

"For?"

"For the Lord to show you the path." He said it plainly, the way he says most things, no weight added beyond what the words already carried on their own. "You cannot fix this by deciding to fix it. You'll know when it's time to say something. You don't yet."

I sighed, because I'd known that was coming the second I opened my mouth, and hearing it out loud didn't make it land any easier. "That's what I figured you'd say."

"Then why ask?"

"Because sometimes I want you to surprise me."

"I rarely do," Jacob said, gifting me a real smile, and went back to examining the drawbridge with the same patient focus he'd been giving it before I interrupted.

I let it sit. He was right, and I knew he was right, and knowing it didn't change the low simmer of unease that had been sitting in my chest since that wall came into view. Some things you can't force into being ready before they are, and Rachel — and whatever this was building toward with Byron Hawk — clearly wasn't ready yet, and neither, if I was honest, was I. I realized later I had completely missed Jacob’s smile.

I found out later that evening, mostly by accident, that Rachel wasn't the only person in this family's orbit whose one light had started pointing somewhere it probably shouldn't.

Roiya was on her phone with someone while I was still at Jeremiah's, close enough to overhear one half of it from across the room, which is the kind of thing I try not to do and generally fail at, given that Roiya doesn't so much conduct phone calls as broadcast them.

"No — no, don't — " She was pacing near the window, phone to her ear, free hand doing something sharp and dismissive in the air like she was swatting the conversation itself. "That's not — I never said that, Greg, I said I needed space, that's a completely different — "

A pause. Whatever came back clearly didn't help.

"Then maybe you shouldn't have," she said, flat, final, the particular tone she'd started using more often lately, an edge I didn't remember from a year ago. "Fine. Fine. Great. Have a nice life."

She hung up. Didn't throw the phone, which felt like restraint rather than calm, and stood at the window for a second with her jaw working before she seemed to remember there were other people in the house and put her professional face back on, or tried to.

Curtis was in his usual chair, laptop half-closed, and I watched her cross the room and drop down next to him with the particular gravity of someone whose day had just acquired one more thing wrong with it.

"Greg's an idiot," she announced.

"Noted," Curtis said, and closed the laptop the rest of the way, giving her his full attention with the same unhurried patience I'd watched him deploy every time this exact scene had played out over the last several months, more than the Library of Congress has books.

"He wanted to know where 'this' was going." She made air quotes with enough force to qualify as light cardio. "I told him I didn't know. That's a normal answer. That's an honest answer. He acted like I'd insulted his mother."

"Some men need a timeline," Curtis said, mild.

"Then some men can find someone who has one to give them," Roiya said. "I'm not — I don't owe anyone a five-week plan just because they took me to dinner."

Curtis nodded, the small, careful nod of a man who understood that his role here was not to disagree with any of it, regardless of what he actually thought, and possibly regardless of whether he thought anything close to what he was hearing was fully accurate.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I don't think you did anything wrong."

"I know I didn't," she said, though something in her voice cracked slightly around the edge of the sentence, betraying a little more uncertainty than the words themselves carried.

"Then that's settled," Curtis said.

She talked for another ten minutes — Greg, and something Greg's sister had apparently said at some point that Roiya had only just found out about, and a general theory of men she was constructing in real time that grew less charitable with every example she added to it. Curtis listened to the whole thing. He asked one or two questions, gentle, well-placed, the kind that let her keep going rather than steering her anywhere. He didn't offer his own opinion beyond the two words I'd already caught. He didn't check his phone once, didn't glance at the laptop he'd set aside, didn't do any of the small things a person does when they're waiting for their turn to talk instead of actually listening.

And when she finished, she thanked him — genuinely, I think, in whatever register Roiya has for genuine gratitude these days — stood up, and went to find Rebecca in the kitchen, already moving on to whatever came next.

Curtis sat there another moment. Opened the laptop back up. Didn't say anything to me, though he had to know I'd caught most of it, sitting twenty feet away with nothing else to occupy my attention.

I watched him for a second, turning something over I didn't quite have words for yet.

It wasn't the pattern itself that caught my attention — Roiya cycling through men had become, over the last several months, so much like a video game score that I'd genuinely lost count of names. It was the shape of her lately. Something sharper in it. The eye-rolling in the hospital waiting room, months back, had read as ordinary irritation, the kind anybody gets when a relationship isn't working. This was different. There was an edge to her now that hadn't been there even a few months ago, a quickness to dismiss, a tone that landed harder than the situations seemed to call for.

I filed it. Not with alarm — I want to be honest that nothing in me was ringing bells yet, no cold feeling down the spine, nothing that told me this belonged in the same drawer as Isaiah and the garden and a name I now knew to attach to both. It just went in as a note. An observation about a woman I loved, getting a little harder around the edges in a way I couldn't yet explain and hadn't yet connected to anything beyond the ordinary difficulty of being a young, striking, unmarried woman fending off more attention than any one person should reasonably have to field.

Perhaps, if I took the time to rummage through the mental file cabinet, I could more pieces together. Rachel and Roiya were all marking time, rather than living their lives. Rather than dive in to what I’d observed lately, I filed it again. I think one of the support seams on the cabinet cracked.

I didn't say anything to Jacob about it that night. Partly because I didn't have anything specific enough to say. Partly because some part of me — the same part that had learned not to poke at Roiya's love life directly — had decided this one could wait too.

I've since had cause to revisit that decision as well.