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It doesn't seem fair, that I could sleep so well and so long after watching Jeremy die. But I guess my body gets to the point where it doesn't so much fall asleep as collapse in rebellion, and all I can do is trust that Wyatt will keep me safe while I'm dead to the world. I know that the truck moved sometime in the night, and I'm grateful. Roy's not a courageous dude, and I'm pretty sure he peed himself
as he ran away, but I'm glad he didn't have the opportunity to come back and get himself killed, messing with us.

Wyatt is curled around me, and birds are singing outside. For just a moment, I feel safe. Protected. I'm facing the wall, and he's snuggled up behind me, breathing softly. I smile to myself and scoot back a little, into the welcoming curve of his body, and his arm lazily sweeps over me, easy as pie. I sigh, and I feel him wake up. He makes a happy groan and pulls me even closer, and it's so perfect it feels like a dream, even if I'm repressing last night so hard that I'm about to grind open a badly done filling.

“You're safe,” he murmurs into my ear.

I lean back to kiss his cheek. “Why wouldn't I be?”

He nuzzles my neck, breath hot in that tender place behind my ear. “I was pretty sure that kid was going to shoot you last night. I still can't believe we got out of there alive. I guess I don't really trust anything good anymore. I don't expect it to last.”

“I don't want to talk about last night. But I know what you mean.”

“It's almost like I don't deserve it.” He pulls me closer, holds me tighter, like he's drowning. I turn in his arms and look into his eyes from inches away. The whites are tinged red, maybe from the bonfire or the crying, and it makes little sparks of gold stand out in the brown.

“Don't be silly,” I say. “It's not about deserving. Things just happen.”

“Sometimes they happen for a reason.”

“I still don't know why my dad left or why my mom got cancer,” I say, matching his serious tone and veering toward grumpy. “But I don't think it's because I deserve to suffer.” I put my hands on either side of his face, and inside, I'm thrilling at the openness, of touching his sleep-warm stubble. “What's wrong? Did you have a bad dream?”

“Something like that. Are you hungry?”

I smile indulgently as he rolls onto the floor, stands, and stretches, his arms bent to keep from scraping the low ceiling.

“You're a walking appetite,” I say, and he grins wolfishly.

“I ran into a gunfight yesterday.” He rubs his tummy. “Two, actually. A Croissan'wich isn't asking a lot.”

My stomach sinks and burbles.
Repress, repress, repress.

I will not think about Jeremy.

I will not think about crows pecking out his eyes and frost in his mustache stubble.

I will not think about how he said “green-suit
Matrix
assholes,” but all the Valor guys wear black.

I will not think about how I prefer hunting to being hunted.

There has to be something good left in the world, but I can't think of it right now.

Oh, wait. Yes, I can.

“And we get Matty back today.” I sit up and stretch, my body
stiff and aching. With the truck's back door up a few inches, there's a chill in the air, outside of the blankets. I'm glad this stupid assignment happened just as fall was getting crisp and not in the still suffocation of summer or the cold steel of winter.

“You want to knock out the next person on the list first?”

He stretches again as he looks at the list, and I see his hip bones and the top of his boxers and a line of golden hair. I almost reach out to touch him, but I'm not that brave yet.

“Alistair Meade,” I say from memory. “Sounds old. Maybe British.”

“Sounds like the killer in a horror flick.”

“Maybe he's an elderly ax murderer, then,” I say. “I just hope it's . . .”

“Easy?”

I wince and hug myself. “Yeah. That last one hurt.”

“You never told me what happened with Tom Morrison. But he took the deal, right?”

“Yeah. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. He had a little girl.”

“I saw her. When they opened the door.”

“She looked just like me when I was a kid. He's a single dad. It was a mortgage, or whatever, to buy the house. It wasn't even that expensive. I just felt bad.”

Wyatt's eyebrows draw down. “That doesn't seem fair.”

“I know, right?” I put a firm hand over the pillow to make sure the button is muffled, like I'm talking to myself, maybe. “I mean, no offense, but Dr. Ken Belcher buying more fancy cars and expensive countertops and handmade shoes or whatever, guys like him kind of deserve what they get. But Tom was being responsible. Reasonable. He was trying to be good. He was going to pay it off.”

“So you think guys like my dad deserve it, huh?” Wyatt says, voice ragged.

“I just mean . . .”

I look down. We haven't really talked about what happened that first day.

“No. I know what you mean. And I get it. My dad's an asshole.
Was
an asshole. But say somebody ran up a bunch of debt and then felt bad and wanted to pay it all back. Do they still deserve it then?”

“Wait. I'm confused. Was your dad paying off his debt?”

“Forget it,” Wyatt says. He ruffles my hair like he's distracted and rolls up the truck door.

The scene outside is unfamiliar, a ripped-up old fence and trees. As he lumbers off in the woods to do whatever guys do when they wake up in the morning, I whip out one of my disposable finger toothbrushes and exhale in relief as the dead-skunk morning breath is replaced with perky mint. I want to ask him more about his dad, and about his brother, too. And I know he wants to ask me more about the list and what happens when we get to the tenth name. To
his brother. If Wyatt will inherit their debt and be scared of doorbells and fruit baskets for the rest of his life. If his brother will take the deal.

But we're both holding back from talking about any of that, and I don't want to be the one to bring it up. Hell, I can't even ask him how he's going to pay for the rest of Matty's surgery bill, why he has a Valor Savings Bank card in the first place. We didn't ask how much it was going to cost, but he didn't flinch when he handed over his credit card. Not like my mom always does.

I stare at the list and contemplate what kind of guy Alistair Meade will be. I wonder if he lives alone and if his house has a nice shower. I wonder if Valor has taken over Chateau Tuscano as a headquarters, or given it to some high-ranking official. Or maybe burned it to the ground. If there's one thing I learned from history class, it's that whoever wins the war finishes the story.

While Wyatt is gone, I roll down the door and give myself a frantically fast bird bath with shower wipes and slip on a new tank top and panties, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and my other pair of jeans. The whole plain, white uniform is making me feel bland and utili­tarian. The blood-spattered, crinkled postal shirt is beyond pathetic by this point, like some leftover prop from a horror movie. And I have to sew that button back on, quick.

I roll up the back door, and Wyatt's standing there, smiling.

“Oh my God, creeper! Were you watching me under the door?”
I say with mock outrage, although secretly I'm amused and can't stop grinning and blushing.

“Just your feet,” he says with an answering grin. “I like your blue toenails.”

He takes the driver's seat on the hunt for breakfast, which is fine with me. I have my license and have never been in an accident or anything, but we definitely can't afford two cars at home. I've just never been comfortable with driving the way that my friends are, and I always marvel at our delivery guys at work, that they're perfectly happy doing nothing but driving around for six hours a night, delivering pizza to strangers in cars that permanently reek of cigarettes and greasy pepperoni.

“Where were we?” I ask as the truck bumps up old asphalt.

“Just another place I know, where me and Mikey used to hang. I figure that if that Jeremy kid could find us, either your shirt or the truck is being tracked. I didn't want to abandon it without discussing it first, so I just moved it while you were asleep. Are they going to keep sending twerpy vigilantes after you? Why would they try to kill you, anyway? Don't you work for them?”

I snort. These are the same questions that are driving me crazy, but I can't come up with any good answers, and I can't let worry tear me apart when I have a job to do. And that makes me angry. “How the hell am I supposed to know? I don't have an itinerary with
almost get shot by your friends in an empty field after midnight
penciled in. All
I know is what they told me. And that without the GPS, we don't know how to find the people on the list. And without the shirt button, I don't get credit for the kills. And without the kills, my mom fucking dies.”

He takes it in stride, just absorbs my rage and nods. “Can we just pull the info out of the GPS?”

I prod the screwed-down machine with a blue-nailed toe. “Be my guest. That thing's tech is tighter than a turtle's butt.”

Wyatt pulls into a different gas station, one in the opposite direction of where my mom and I do most of our business. When they cleared the land to build, they seriously destroyed everything around it, and it looks ugly and unnatural, rising out of the dead yellow grass beside a tree-covered mountain. There's a long, paved road down the hill that dead-ends into the asphalt, crisscrossed with chains and No Trespassing signs.

I sigh, the anger draining away.
Repress, repress, repress
. Who needs yoga or therapy when you can be an ostrich with your head up your own ass? “I always wanted to go sledding down that hill,” I say.

“I'm in.” Wyatt holds out his pinkie. “First time it snows, we're sledding here.”

I hold out my pinkie, and we shake on it. And then I blush hot when I realize that he's making plans with me for something that won't happen for at least two months, if it even snows at all this year.
That he's thinking of me beyond the end of this assignment—and in a way that involves both of us alive and not hating or regretting each other. I hop out and follow him into the gas station's artificial warmth.

He goes straight for the hot biscuits and coffee. I make a beeline for the random collection of housewares and find a sewing kit. When we meet at the counter, I realize that I've forgotten to bring cash. I was too busy navigating my feelings for Wyatt and pondering Alistair Meade and remembering the night Jeremy and Roy and I came here and had a Slushie-drinking contest and purple ice came out of my nose. My head hurts so much I feel like I'm about to have a nosebleed.

“I'll be right back,” I whisper, and Wyatt has to notice me blushing, my hands in my empty pockets.

“Don't worry. I've got it.” He dumps his stuff on the counter, just a corner of the Valor card flashing as he pays. Does he not want me to see it? He signs his receipt, grabs his plastic bag, and we're out the door. He shoves a hot biscuit into my hands, and I waffle on whether or not to bring up how extremely stupid it is to owe Valor any money right now. But I'm so happy in the moment that I don't want to ruin the morning. Not until it has to be ruined, which will be sooner than I'd prefer. The problem with repressing things, with sticking your head in the sand and ignoring them, is that they're eventually going to bite your butt when you least expect it.
Which is pretty much why America is owned by a bank now.

So instead of saying something scathing, I just smile and take a bite of my biscuit.

We can't drive back to our usual hideout because Jeremy—oh God, Jeremy!—so Wyatt takes the truck down a long dirt road with huge pipes piled up at the end amid the bonfire-singed remains of industrial drums. I give him a look, one eyebrow up.

“I know every dead end in this county, darlin'.” He's smirking now, and I roll my eyes.

We eat in the back of the truck in companionable silence. The door is rolled up, and our view of the field and forest is the sort of thing rich people pay mad cash to enjoy on the other side of their breakfast nooks. It occurs to me that I haven't had breakfast with anyone except my mom in years, and that I miss the way she blows on her oatmeal between bites, even when it's cooled off. She never talks much at breakfast—she prefers to read the romance novels she checks out of the library and stacks on her bedside table in impossibly tall towers. I tried one once, but it was embarrassingly hokey. I'm just too practical to believe in all that magic and vampires and fairies and true love. But I'm glad my mom still has dreams, locked somewhere inside her. I need to think about her having hope.

I glance at the clock. Ten thirty. An hour and a half to kill a guy or ruin his life, and then it's time to pick up Matty, and I want
to be there the second they'll let us take her home. Home to the mail truck, I guess. We'll have to dump it after this Alistair guy, in case they're sending more Jeremys after me. That doesn't matter. I know where the last two people live, although I'll miss having a bed. I wish I had the time and money to get Matty a really nice dog bed too, something fluffy that she would like. But I already owe Wyatt enough, and I don't want to run up his card any more for something as silly as a dog bed. Maybe I can knit her a blanket when all this is over.

I toss my rest of my biscuit in the trash and wipe the buttery crumbs off my hands and jeans before pulling out my knitting bag. The black stripe I was working on last time is totally wonky, so I frog it and grab some rainbow yarn that feels scratchy but looks cheerful. When I'm done with Valor, I'll get some nice, soft yarn for Matty from the actual yarn store—mohair, maybe, not my usual Goodwill trash yarn. I've never knit a blanket before, but it can't be that hard. A few rows in, and I exhale, enjoying the familiar, reassuring click of the needles. I look over when I hear Wyatt crumple up his third biscuit wrapper, and it turns out he bought a small crossword puzzle book in the gas station and has it open to the first page as he chews on a cheap pen.