His face told me everything.
Not immediately. He walked in the way he always walked in — the bell, the cedar, the room shifting. He sat at the counter. He looked at me across eighteen inches of beetle-kill pine and his eyes were the October eyes and his mouth was the mouth that had been on my mouth and my throat and my collarbone less than forty-eight hours ago and his face was open the way it had been open since the blizzard, since the Neruda, since the night I'd crossed the threshold.
Then I set the partnership terms on the counter between us.
Not Dana's counter-terms. Marcos's original draft. Fifteen percent. Non-voting. Advisory capacity. The document that had been drafted by his attorney without my knowledge and sent to my attorney without my review. I set it on the wood the way Mares had set the injunction filing on a nightstand in Vail — a piece of paper landing on a surface I'd built, carrying the weight of a truth I hadn't consented to.
His face changed.
