Chapter Twelve
E van grunted as the pistol clattered to the ground and went off in the dirt. Trey Reyes jumped Clulagher and wrestled him to the ground. Sarah fell as well, then crabbed out of the way. Instantly, Cooper was there, dragging her up, away from the struggle. Evan and Trey fought briefly before Cooper joined in, gaining advantage. Fury overtook him as he punched Evan hard in the face, over and over until Trey stopped him, rolling the man over and locking Evan’s hands behind his back.
“Yeah, you bastard,” Cooper spat. “That was for my father. For the eight years he spent behind bars because of you.”
Muttering curses, Evan lay defeated, face down, bleeding on the dirt barn floor.
With his knee on Evan’s back, Trey met Cooper’s look and grinned. “We got ’im.” He pulled a pair of zip ties from his back pocket and locked Evan’s hands behind him.
Cooper nodded, breathing hard, his heart still racing. “Where’d you come from?”
“I just had a feeling. Pulled up down the road. Looks like I was right.” Trey’s dark hair fell in his eyes. “You call the sheriff,” he told Cooper quietly. “I was never here.”
Cooper nodded and pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed the sheriff.
Brushing the dirt off himself, Trey dragged Clulagher over to the wall and shoved him against it.
Cooper hung up the phone, looking over at Shay and Sarah embracing. “Sarah. Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“No. I’m okay.”
Shay refused to look at him, but he could see she was crying. She swiped at her cheeks angrily with her palms.
“Shay—listen to me,” he began, but she put her hand up to stop him from saying anything more.
Frustrated, he turned to Trey. “The sheriff’s on his way.”
“Great!” Shay said. “That’s just great. Perfect! The sheriff! Now we’re ruined. Everything we’ve worked so hard for. He’ll see the money, linking us to whatever our father was up to. That we had no part of. It’s just perfect!”
The four of them stood in silence for a long moment before Trey reached for the duffel. “What if he doesn’t?”
Shay shot him a questioning look.
“What if there is no money to find?”
Evan Clulagher groaned miserably.
“What if,” Trey proposed, lifting the duffel over his shoulder, “all this disappears? What if I take it out of here right now and they never see it?”
Shay shot a look at Cooper. “And do what with it?”
Trey shrugged. “TBD. But this fool will never see a dime of it again.”
The accusing look on Shay’s face put a dark look on Cooper’s own. “I’ll tell them all about it!” Clulagher snarled from his corner. “I’ll tell them all how you made off with my money.”
“What money?” Trey snorted. “Nothing here but a sad, old, desperate man trying to pin the blame for what he did on everyone else.” He pointed at the hole in the wall. “Oh, and that? That’s just demolition. Just like everywhere else on this property. And FYI, you weren’t as clever as you thought you were fixing Ray’s books. If they’d looked a little bit closer, they would have found what we found. Your digital fingerprints all over those transactions that framed Ray. So, not so smart after all, are you, Evan?”
Evan slunk down against the wall, silent again.
“I’d better get out of here before the sheriff comes.” Trey looked at Sarah. “Cooper, you stay here and wait for him. Sarah and Shay, you should get out of here, too. No use complicating matters any more than they are.”
Shay nodded, tugging her mother by the arm. She stopped to pick up the keys that had fallen out of Evan’s hands, then turned back to Cooper.
He blinked at her, unsure what to say. Knowing anything he said now would only make things worse.
Anger was still burning in her eyes. “You know, I’ve been disappointed by people before, Cooper. But you? You’ve just managed to set a whole new bar. I actually let myself care about you! So, thank you. Thank you for reminding me that trust is just another word for gullible. And that I’m the fool. Again.”
*
“This isn’t Cooper’s fault,” Sarah told her riding back to the ranch in her truck. “None of this is Cooper’s fault.”
Shay stared straight ahead, her fingers tight on the wheel.
“This all started a long time ago, before you were even out of school.”
“Your affair with Ray, you mean?”
Sarah blinked. “It wasn’t an affair.”
“Not what Dad thought.” She pulled the note she’d found in the bible from her pocket and handed it to Sarah. “Care to explain?”
Sarah rolled her eyes shut and her face contorted with pain. “You’re upset. I can see that. But this was between me and your father and—”
“You forgot Ray. He was somewhere in the middle of all this, too.”
“Everything—life—is more complicated than you’re expecting, Shay. I get that. But it’s not because you’re naive or because Cooper came here hoping to help his father. It’s because we are all just trying to get things right. And your father and I, we never really could.”
“So, you cheated on him? Why didn’t you just divorce him? That would have been more honest.”
Sarah bent her head. “It would have. And I intended to do just that. But then... complications. I lost my nerve after Ray went to prison.”
Shay wanted to plug her ears, sing la, la, la! at the thought of her parents blatantly lying to one another for so long. But avoiding the truth was how she’d gotten here in the first place. “He knew, apparently?”
Her mother nodded. “He guessed, though he never confronted me. We just pretended for a very long time. Until he died. I’m sorry you had to find out this way. But I would have told you eventually. And trust that you could forgive me.”
“Forgive you for cheating on my father?”
“No. For wanting to live my life fully. For wanting love in my life.”
Shay felt tears leak out of her eyes.
Sarah crumpled Tom’s note in her hand. “Drop me off at Ray’s apartment. We need to get a few things straightened out.”
“Fine.”
Sarah braced her hand on the dashboard and turned to Shay. “I don’t know why you’re so willing to believe the worst about Cooper but—”
She steered the truck over a rough patch of dirt road, scowling. “Did you hear him defend himself? No. Because it was all true.”
“Did you give him a chance to defend himself? You did not. You just accused him of the most awful things.”
“True things.”
“I think you’re wrong.” Sarah folded her arms angrily against her chest. “Do you know what I think? I think you’re mad because you finally allowed yourself to be open enough to fall in love with someone. And he happens to have a past, too. Which is not a crime. Why is that so impossible to understand?”
“It’s not his past I’m upset about. He was here under false pretenses. And I am not in love with him. Yeah, I’m mad. I’m mad-hurt. Why can’t you understand that? He was just... using me to get to all this. How can I trust a man who lies to my face?”
“Did he though? Did it ever occur to you that he might have been trying to protect us from what your father did until he figured out what really happened? That he didn’t want you to know that your dad had done something so despicable as blackmail? Or that I was...” She stopped, swallowing back her own tears. “That my life might have been more complicated than you could imagine? Or that the last decade—before he died—had been one big lie for your father and was how our ranch survived on money that didn’t belong to us—without us even knowing?”
No. That hadn’t occurred to her. Was he? Trying to protect her? That sounded convenient. Possible. Heartbreaking. But she felt raw and punched, like someone had hit her in the heart.
Someone. Cooper.
Now what? What was she going to do with him now? Now that they’d made love and said words to each other? How could she even face him again?
She dropped Sarah off at Ray’s apartment and tried not to think of Cooper and what was going on up at the round barn. She didn’t want to think of him at all. Which proved impossible as she pulled into the yard to find Ryan waving to her from the paddock with Kholá. He was riding her bareback, without so much as a set of reins. The horse took note of her, ears pricked forward as she walked toward the pen.
Ryan, always the observer, instantly saw something was wrong. “Are you crying?”
She thought about telling him the truth but pasted a bright smile on her face. “Oh, it’s all the autumn pollen. I’m fine. What are you doing home so early? Did Cami bring you?”
“No. Keegan’s mom gave me a ride. Remember? It was an early day for teacher stuff.”
“Oh, right.” Could the timing be any worse? She petted Kholá over the fence as she walked up to greet her, trying to figure how to keep him away from all of this. “Um. I’m going to go inside and um... have some tea. Are you hungry?”
“No, we stopped for lunch on the way. Hey, have you seen Cooper? I wanted to show him what Kholá is doing. Look.” Using only his legs, he backed the horse up around in a circle. “Isn’t she amazing? Cooper said it would take a while for her to do that, but she got it right away.”
Shay sniffed and chucked a knuckle beneath her nose. “That’s awesome, Ry. But listen, about Cooper...”
“Ray promised we’d go fishing this afternoon, too. Maybe you and Cooper can come.”
She couldn’t look him in the eye. Thinking back to her son’s demeanor only a few months ago, before Cooper and Ray, before Kholá and everything that had happened in-between, the difference in this boy was like the shift that Dorothy took in the Wizard of Oz as she moved from her black and white world into a world of color. Ryan’s world had brightened and opened to all the colors because of Cooper, and she had just taken that away from him.
No, not her. Cooper had done that.
“I think they might be tied up with something else this afternoon. Hey, why don’t we go into town and find you some new football cleats. You’re outgrowing yours.”
“Not today. He promised. I was just going to go over and—”
“Grandma’s over there now,” she said, cutting him off. “They’re talking. This isn’t a good time.”
Ryan narrowed a look at her. “What’s going on, Mom? What aren’t you telling me?”
*
“Were you ever going to tell me, Ray?” Sarah asked, her hand still on the doorknob behind her.
Ray’s hand froze on the teakettle he’d just put on the stove. “Tell you? Tell you what?”
“The truth. About why you wouldn’t see me in prison? About Tom blackmailing Evan Clulagher and you both.”
“What?” He turned to stare at her. “Tom wasn’t—”
“No more lies, Ray. It’s time for the truth. I know now that Tom knew about us. I suspected that for a long time. But Evan’s alive. I just met him, in fact, up at the round barn.”
“You what ? Sarah—!” He moved toward her with real concern.
“I’m fine. But as you might imagine, it was not a pleasant meeting at all.”
“What the—He’s here? In Marietta? Is that who has been breaking into—”
“Yes. It’s all right. He’s in custody now. Trey Reyes and Cooper saw to that.”
“Trey... who?”
She blinked at him. “You didn’t know about him?”
“Who is he?”
“A private investigator that Cooper hired.”
Ray shook his head. “Ahhh. I told him. I didn’t want him to hire any—”
“Well, he did. And now, it’s done, Ray. He found evidence that proves your innocence. And Evan is finally going to pay for the lies he told about you.”
For a long, lifetime of a moment Ray stared at her, hardly believing what she was saying. “No.”
“Yes. It’s true.” She reached out a hand to him and he took it, pulling her close. She felt his shoulders shake as emotion passed through him. It had been a long road. Much too long a road for Ray. After a moment, she rubbed a hand against his back and pulled back to look at him.
“You knew that Tom knew about us. Didn’t you? Did he come to you? Tell you that he knew?”
Ray lowered his head. “It was before the trial, but after Evan vanished. I’d heard a jailhouse rumor from one of Evan’s lackeys that there had been someone out there blackmailing Evan over the rustling. Someone named Tom, but they didn’t know a last name. And somehow, I just knew it was your Tom. I called him and he came to see me. I knew he could clear my name. He knew I wasn’t part of it. But he basically came to gloat and to tell me that he knew I was innocent. But he wanted me to know that he would never, ever help me to clear my name. Because of you. Because I’d stolen you from him. He didn’t actually admit to the blackmail, but he did say that if I ever tried to implicate him it would ruin you and the kids and the whole Hard Eight ranch would go down. Was that what I wanted? he asked. To ruin you? To have you arrested?”
“Oh, Ray...”
“No, I would never have—it was my choice. That was how it had to be. I couldn’t tell you.”
“If I had known—”
“What? What could you have done?”
“I never would have let you sit in prison all those years. I would have told the truth about what Tom had done. About what Evan was paying him for. We would have walked away from all of this. Away from Tom and his lies. I should have. But I lost courage when you went away. Our marriage was over long before you and I fell in love.” She cupped her hand against his cheek. “I know you did that for me. For us. I’ll never be able to repay you for your sacrifice.”
He pulled her closer and threaded his fingers through her hair. “There is nothing to make up. I would do it all over again today.”
“It’s over now,” she said. “Done. Thank God it’s over now. Except for...”
“What?”
“Your son. My daughter. She’s furious with him for not telling her about Trey. For—in her mind—connecting us to the scandal. And she said things I think she doesn’t mean. At least, I hope she didn’t mean them. He was devastated.”
“Oh, no.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “This is all because of me. What’ll it take to fix this?”
She sighed. “She’s my stubborn one. I really don’t know. A miracle?”