"How long have you been here?" she asked, working on his ankle restraints.
"Two days," he said, "maybe a little more. We lost track of time."
"Two days in this heat." She said it flatly, not as a question, because the math wasn't complicated. Montana summer, no shade worth speaking of, no water. Four men chained to the back wall of an abandoned building on a highway that saw maybe a dozen cars a day. "You should be in a hospital."
"We're okay."
"You're dehydrated and you've got heat exhaustion at minimum." She cut through the ankle chain with considerably less trouble than the wrist restraints. The links were thinner there, just like the big man had suggested. "There's water in the cab of my truck. I want all of you drinking as soon as I get these off."
Ryan Whitman looked at her for a long moment. "Why are you doing this?" he asked. It wasn't an accusatory question. It was genuine, almost childlike in its directness, the way exhausted people sometimes drop all their social armor and just ask the thing they actually mean.
Evelyn sat back on her heels, thought about it honestly the way she always thought about questions people deserved a real answer to. "Because you're here," she said, "and you needed somebody."
She moved to the next man. Nathan Grayson was younger, 26, though she wouldn't know that until later. He had dark hair and a beard that had grown wild during the two days, and he was the quietest of the four, watching everything with careful dark eyes. He didn't speak while she worked on his chains. But when his hands came free, he looked at them for a long moment like he was relearning something basic, and then he looked up at her and said, "My grandmother used to say the Lord sends help in the shapes we least expect."
Evelyn made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh, but was close enough. "Your grandmother sounds like a smart woman."
"She was," Nathan said. "She died two years ago."
"I'm sorry."
"She would have liked you."
Evelyn moved to the last man. Derek Morrison was the largest of the four, wide across the shoulders in a way that suggested his body had been built by work rather than vanity. He'd said nothing since her return, watching with the contained weariness of someone who'd learned that offers of help rarely came without a price. His chains were the heaviest. The locks were older, more rusted, and it took Evelyn four attempts at different angles before she found purchase.
"You can ask," he said finally while she was working.
"Ask what?"
"Whatever you're trying not to ask." He watched her face. "People always have something they want to know. Usually it's whether we're dangerous, or why we live the way we do, or whether the stories they have heard are true."
Evelyn kept cutting. "That's their question, not mine."
He was quiet for a moment. "What's your question, then?"
She looked up at him briefly. "What do you take in your coffee?"
He blinked. "What?"
"I've got a thermos in the truck. It's black, but I've got sugar packets in the glove compartment. I can't do much about the lack of cream out here, but I'm asking so I know what to offer."
Derek Morrison stared at her, and then something happened in his face that she suspected didn't happen often. The hard outer shell of a man who'd spent years making himself unreadable cracked open just slightly, just enough to show something underneath that was younger, less armored, and entirely human.
"Black's fine," he said quietly.