Chapter 12 #2
I can see the exact set of his jaw when Kenna asked what was wrong, the deflection he'd have used, the way he'd have grinned and changed the subject because Grant could charm his way out of a burning building.
The last normal day he had with the person he loved most, and he spent it lying to her face to keep her safe.
The irony of that is not lost on me. Lying to the people you love to keep them safe is apparently a Corbin family trait. His sister inherited it along with his eyes.
"Grant and I drove this road once," I say. "After a three-day event in Durango. We were so beat up we could barely get into the truck. He had a separated shoulder and I had two cracked ribs, and we argued the whole way about who was less injured and therefore had to drive."
"Who won?"
"He did. He always won the arguments. Said God gave me the body for riding and him the brain for talking, and that division of labor had served us well for a decade."
Kenna laughs. The sound is sudden and real and it lands somewhere under my ribs that I wasn't guarding. She cuts it short, presses her lips together, and looks out the window.
"He'd say that," she says. "He always thought he was the smart one."
"He was the smart one. I'm just the one who's too stubborn to die."
"Stubborn is underselling it. I've seen mules with more give."
"You comparing me to a mule?"
"I'm comparing you to a mule and the mule is coming out ahead on personality.
" She glances at me, and the challenge in her eyes is the same challenge that hooked me the first night, back when she was a journalist with a sharp mouth and I was a rider with a death wish and neither of us knew we were both lying about who we were.
"Grant wouldn't have trusted you with his dying words if you were just muscle.
He trusted you because you're the most relentless person he knew, and coming from Grant, that's saying something. "
I let that land and don't respond, because responding would mean softening, and softening would mean reaching across the console, and reaching across the console would mean putting my hands on her, and my hands on her right now would not be gentle.
"I told you about the phone call the night before Las Cruces. How he told me what he’d found out, about how I got there too late.
But at the end of the call he said something I didn't understand at the time.
He said, 'Look after my sister. She'll come looking when she hears.
She's stubborn like me. Don't let her do anything stupid. '"
The silence in the cab is absolute. "He knew," Kenna says. Her voice is barely audible. "He knew I'd come."
"He knew you better than he knew anyone. He knew you'd show up on this circuit with some kind of plan and enough stubbornness to get yourself killed." The next part sticks in my throat. I have to shove it out. "He asked me to look after you, and instead I—"
I stop. The sentence bucks like something I can't stay on top of.
"Instead you what?" Kenna asks.
"Instead I did a pretty lousy job of it."
"You kept me alive through a car chase, a break-in, at least two situations where someone was actively trying to kill us. That's not lousy. That's pretty damn good."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know what you mean." Her voice is quiet. Steady. She's giving me the exit ramp, letting me not say the thing we both know is sitting in the cab between us. She could push. She doesn't.
"I should've figured it out sooner," I say, and the words come out rough, scraped raw, the way they do when I'm saying something I'll regret.
"Who you were. I had all the pieces. Your age, your background, the way you talked about the circuit like it was personal.
The way you looked at the Las Cruces footage.
" I stare at the road. "I didn't figure it out because I didn't want to.
Because figuring it out meant 'the woman I'—" I stop again.
Recalibrate. "It meant everything got complicated. And I liked it uncomplicated."
The admission is sideways and incomplete and it reveals more than I intended, which is exactly how I handle every conversation that matters. Kenna is quiet for a long time. She doesn't push for the word I swallowed, the one that would've come after 'the woman I.' She just lets the silence hold it.
"For what it's worth," she says, "I usually do too, but sometimes complicated leads to better things."
The miles pass. The mesas flatten.
The silence between us shifts from hostile to something with weight and heat.
Near the outskirts of Socorro, the sun gone and the stars punching through above the desert, I ask the question that's been sitting on my tongue since Creede.
"Would Grant have wanted this? Us, working together?"
Kenna doesn't hesitate. "Grant would have wanted whoever killed him to burn. He wouldn't care how we got there. As for our sleeping together? I think it was something he would have engineered down the road. He always said you were the best man he ever knew, and I think he'd want that for me."
The answer is so immediate and so certain that I look at her. In the dashboard light, her face is all angles and conviction, the jaw set, the eyes flat and sure. She's Grant's sister. She fought her way onto a circuit where people get killed for asking questions, and she did this alone.
I hate that she lied. I respect that she fought. The contradiction won't go down no matter how many times I swallow it.
We hit the outskirts of Albuquerque as the last light dies behind the mesas. "The bank won't be open until morning," Kenna says. "We need somewhere to sleep."
"I know a place. Another rider's house. He's on the road, owes me a favor, said I can use it whenever."
"Does this other rider have actual coffee?"
"He has a Keurig and a bottle of Jack Daniels."
"That'll do."
I pull off the interstate and head toward the North Valley. The rider's house is a small adobe on a quiet street lined with cottonwoods. I find the key beneath a clay pot by the side gate and let us in through the kitchen door.
The house is dark and smells like dust and leather. Two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen with tile counters and a window that faces the Sandias. I turn on a lamp and the room fills with warm yellow light, and the domesticity of it is jarring against the backdrop of everything we've been through.
Kenna finds the Jack Daniels before I find the light switch in the hallway. She pours two glasses without asking and slides one across the counter toward me. Our fingers come within an inch of touching, and the inch is a canyon, and neither of us bridges it.
"To Grant," she says, and lifts her glass.
"To Grant."
We drink. The bourbon is warm and smooth and entirely wrong for two people who've spent the day driving through the mountains with a dead man's evidence and a relationship they can't define.
"There's food in the pantry," I say. "Rice, canned beans, some seasoning."
"I can cook if you can find a pan."
"You cook?"
"I'm from Texas, Holloway. I could make a meal out of ingredients from a gas station and a hot plate." She opens the pantry and starts pulling cans. "Don't look so shocked. Journalism doesn't pay enough for restaurant habits."
"I'm not shocked. I'm skeptical. Last time somebody offered to cook for me on the road, I ended up with food poisoning from a gas station burrito and spent the next day wishing I'd died."
"That's because you ate a gas station burrito, which is a judgment call so poor it makes my fake press credentials look responsible."
I find a pan in the cabinet beside the stove. I hand it to her, and our fingers brush on the handle. The contact is brief and accidental and it jolts through me like I grabbed a fence charger. She pulls the pan away and turns to the stove, and I see the muscle in her jaw tighten.
We move around each other in the small kitchen, and it's nothing like careful.
It's combative. We crowd each other at the counter and then flinch apart.
She reaches past me for a spoon and her hip catches mine, and neither of us apologizes because apologizing would mean acknowledging what the contact did.
I reach over her for the salt and my chest brushes her back, and she goes rigid. I hold the position for one second longer than necessary because I am not a good man and the heat of her spine against my shirt is the most honest thing I've felt all day.