Chapter Nine
It was an easy couple of hours to Billings.
The hardest part was getting down Copper Mountain without sliding off of it, but that was always true.
The road the locals liked to call Desolation Drive was treacherous even in summer.
Once they made it down the mountain in one piece, the drive from Marietta to Livingston and on to the interstate was a breeze.
Montana was used to its winter storms. And though the drive east was snowy, the road was clear. They reached Billings by midmorning.
Knox had always liked Billings. As they drove into the biggest city in the state, he saw flashy signs for the sporting goods chain that was owned by Billy Grey, the brother of Jason Grey who owned and still ran the bar at Grey’s Saloon in the center of Marietta.
It was kind of like when he’d been looking for property to buy up by Flathead Lake and he’d kept running into the influence of Jonah Flint, who had a big spread up that way.
Jonah was the twin brother of Jasper Flint, who’d opened Knox’s favorite microbrewery, Flintworks, in the old Marietta train depot, while he was busy romancing the woman who was now his wife. And the mayor.
There were Marietta connections everywhere, and even though Knox and his family were Cowboy Point people going back to the community’s founding as a mining camp, he claimed Marietta as his own too. Technically, Cowboy Point was a part of Marietta.
Sometimes Knox felt like Montana was a small town all its own, despite its size. Sometimes that felt claustrophobic. Other times it felt the way it did today, like little markers wherever he looked that he was always home.
He found himself rubbing at his chest, because it was funny how much like home any and every part of Montana felt when Ramona was sitting beside him in his truck, playing him the music she liked and even singing along.
Alarm bells should have been ringing in him at that, but it was all strangely quiet.
Almost… peaceful, he might have said, when that had never been their thing. They were either making up or breaking up, and in between they’d been in bed. He had nothing to compare this to—but he liked it.
Maybe this vulnerability thing was the right move after all, no matter how unsteady it had made him feel.
But there were other things to focus on once they were in Billings.
The address that the girl in Devil’s Gorge had given him led them into a fairly sad sort of neighborhood where all the houses looked on the rundown side of weathered.
There were broken-down vehicles in the yards, covered with snow—but not enough to hide the state most of them were in.
He found the house he was looking for and pulled up in front.
Then sat there.
Beside him, Ramona reached over and put her hand on his leg. “Are you ready?” she asked, and on this side of last night’s revelations and vulnerabilities, that calm tone of hers was soothing. “It’s okay if you’re not. We don’t have to do this at all and we certainly don’t have to do it now.”
Knox found that his chest was even tighter now.
All he could think of was Hailey. The little noises she made.
The way she kicked her feet. The sweet, solid weight of her against his chest. The way she looked when she was sleeping, so hard and deep he sometimes checked her to see if she was breathing.
“I think you and I agree that Shoshana is probably in one kind of trouble or another,” Knox said after a moment, his eyes on the little house though he was still thinking about Hailey.
About her cold cheeks and the wailing sound she’d made on his porch—and what if she hadn’t?
He didn’t like to think about that. So he thought about it all the time.
He had to focus to think about Shoshana Delaney now, the reason he was here in Billings.
“And she chose me to help with some of the trouble she’s in, so what the hell. Let’s help her with all of it.”
When he glanced beside him, Ramona was smiling at him. And her eyes were so soft that it was like he could feel them inside of him. Turning him inside out whether he liked it or not.
“I think that’s an excellent plan,” she said with a nod, and Knox would have come and done this on his own. He knew that. It was the right thing to do. It was about Hailey, not his feelings about what had been done to her—or what could have happened to her.
But it all settled on him better that Ramona was here, and that she thought he was doing the right thing. He wasn’t sure when her opinion had started mattering so much to him.
Maybe around the time she’d become his first call.
Knox had to order himself to keep his head in the game.
When he got out of the truck, she met him at the curb.
It was cold, with a sharp wind that made it worse, but they stood there for a moment anyway.
She looked up at him and then went up on the toes of her boots and kissed him on his cheek. He leaned into it, just for a second.
Then they walked over the half-heartedly shoveled snow that made a haphazard path toward the sullen front door, all chipped paint and a distinct sense of desolation. This was not a house that anyone had tried to make cheerful. Maybe ever.
Though it was a major upgrade from Devil’s Gorge, all the same.
“I’ll knock,” Ramona said as they got to the front step, and looked back at him for confirmation that he was okay with that.
He understood the strategy. She wanted him to keep his distance at first, in case whoever was on the other side of the door here had an issue with a big cowboy showing up uninvited on the doorstep.
A baby at the door was a lot less intimidating. He got that.
Ramona had to knock more than once, but they could both see that smoke was coming from the chimney. There was the sound of a loud television set inside, though it cut off after the third round of knocking.
And when the door opened, Knox braced himself—
But he recognized her.
The girl who had to be Shoshana Delaney looked to be about the same age as the one he’d seen in Devil’s Gorge.
That wasn’t why he recognized her, though.
She was skinnier than he remembered—much skinnier than she probably should have been after having a baby in the last two months, though what did he know.
Her hair was the same coppery color as the tuft on Hailey’s head, or it was where he could see it coming out from beneath the knit hat she wore.
“Oh my God,” Shoshana whispered, her eyes flying wide. “Is the baby okay? How did you find me? Nothing happened to the baby, did it?”
“Hailey’s fine,” Knox told her. “But are you?”
Shoshana stared up at him, looking stunned, like maybe no one had asked her that question in a while.
Since the last time he’d asked her that question, maybe.
She was wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon character on the front.
Her jeans were ripped in a way that suggested use, not fashion.
She had tattoos on her hands that looked like she’d drawn them by hand, more earrings than ears, and too much eye makeup.
She didn’t look old enough to be anyone’s mother, though he knew that wasn’t how the world worked.
He shook his head. “I know you.”
“I’m so sorry.” Shoshana’s eyes filled with tears. “You were so kind to me and I didn’t know what else to do.”
Ramona moved closer, then, and put a hand on the girl’s arm. Knox didn’t know how she managed to do that so smoothly. Because she made it seem so unthreatening, so warm, when Shoshana Delaney looked like the very definition of twitchy.
“Why don’t we go inside?” Ramona suggested. “We can talk. Maybe where it’s a little bit warmer?”
Shoshana looked startled. She wiped at her face, and her fingers came away smudged with black. She glanced over her shoulder, like she couldn’t remember what state the room was in.
“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I mean, it’s okay, but not for too long. I’m not supposed to have visitors.”
She turned and walked inside and they followed, exchanging glances as they went.
Inside the house, it was almost overwhelmingly hot thanks to a woodstove in one corner. It smelled of old, fried food. And it looked very much the way Knox expected. If the shacks in Devil’s Gorge had electricity and stained industrial carpets, they’d pretty much be this.
But it was still an upgrade. He hoped it really was. For her sake.
Shoshana went and sat on an exhausted-looking sofa in the middle of the room, curling her knees up beneath her. Knox thought she looked like a baby herself.
“How did you find me?” Shoshana asked. Her movements were a little jerky, but Knox thought that was adrenaline, not more dangerous substances.
And that was something. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here.
I needed to get away from my family for a while, that’s all, and my friend said I could stay here a while.
” She looked from Knox to Ramona, then back again. “I didn’t think you knew who I was.”
“You didn’t just put my name on the birth certificate,” Knox reminded her. “You put yours, too.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, and sighed. “You have to.”
Knox looked over at Ramona, who was back in unreadable mode, but her gaze was fixed on the girl sitting before them.
She had also sat down on the couch, and somehow managed to look as if she had never been more at ease in her life.
She exuded everything is going to be fine like it was a perfume.
No wonder she was already everyone’s favorite doctor.
And his favorite everything else, but that was going to have to wait.
He focused on the matter at hand. “I didn’t know your name until I saw it on the birth certificate,” he told Shoshana.
“And I’m going to need you to walk me through how we went from me giving you a ride home from a questionable situation outside the Wolf Den in Marietta to you pretending that I’m the father of your baby on a birth certificate. ”