Chapter 18 #3
I tell him about the ride at the South Point Arena, the one I made the night of Merrick's arrest, when I rode like the man he used to compete against instead of the one who showed up to his funeral.
I tell him about Kenna's financial analysis and the way she took Whitfield's deposition questions apart with a composure that reminded me so much of him it tightened my throat.
When I stand, my knees ache from the hard ground and the sun has moved far enough west to put Grant's stone in shade. Kenna squeezes my hand, and the tenderness on her face tells me she knows what this cost and won't insult me by pretending it didn't.
"You okay?" she asks.
"Getting there."
"That's enough." Her fingers tighten around mine, the grip steady and warm and sure. "That's always been enough."
We walk to the truck together, her hand still in mine, and watch the sun drop behind the mountains. The sky goes through every color the desert knows how to make, and the cemetery hill catches the last light before the shadow of the ridge swallows it.
"He'd be proud of you," I say. "What you did for him. What it cost you."
"He told me about you for years. 'My buddy Colt, the one who's too stubborn to lose and too mean to die.'"
"Looks a lot like I’m both."
She squeezes my hand. "Looks like."
We find a motel in Las Cruces and check in. The room smells like industrial detergent, and the air conditioner rattles in a way that suggests it has opinions about its workload, but the sheets are clean and the door locks and the parking lot is quiet.
Kenna showers first. She comes out in one of my t-shirts and nothing else, her hair damp and her legs bare from mid-thigh down.
The sight of her in my t-shirt hits me with the same proprietary heat it did the first time, back in Albuquerque, when she borrowed a flannel shirt because the room was cold and she hadn't packed for it.
I spent the rest of that night trying not to stare at the way the fabric fell against her body.
I'm no better at it now than I was then.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says, climbing into bed.
"Like what?"
"Like you're deciding between sleep and something that requires significantly more energy."
"I'm always deciding that around you. You make it difficult."
"Good." She curls on her side with one hand tucked under her chin and her eyes already heavy. "Hold that thought until morning."
I shower with the water as hot as the motel plumbing will give me, washing off courthouse sweat and cemetery dust and the long miles south.
By the time I kill the light and slide in beside her, she's out.
I settle my arm across her waist, and she shifts back against me without waking, her body fitting against mine with the ease of a habit that's still new enough to surprise me.
I breathe in the motel shampoo and the scent underneath it that belongs only to her, clean skin and something faintly sweet that I've never been able to name but would recognize blind.
I think about the deposition. About Whitfield's pen and Torres's suppressed smile and the word 'manipulated' coming through the conference room door.
I think about Kenna sitting in that chair, fielding questions about her dead brother from a woman whose client ordered his murder, and answering with a composure that told a defense attorney billing more per hour than I earn per ride to review her own client's financials.
I think about Flint's son. Ten years in silence. A father who watched the circuit grind forward over the grave of his boy and said nothing because saying something meant risking everything, and in the end the silence cost him more than the risk ever could have.
Grant could have been another name on that list of quiet losses, another suspicious accident that nobody questioned.
He could have been another family left to grieve alone, visiting a stone on a hill while the questions it raised stayed too dangerous to ask out loud.
The difference is that Grant fought back.
Kenna picked up where he left off. And now Flint is finally fighting too, a decade late, carrying his boy's name into a federal courtroom where it can do what he was too scared to let it do when it mattered most.
Mostly I think about the woman asleep against me and the word I haven't said yet. The word that's been building since a motel in Albuquerque and a kitchen in Creede and a storage yard in Tucson where I thought the shots were meant for me and my only regret was that I hadn't told her.
Her breathing is slow and even, and her fingers are curled loosely around my forearm where it crosses her stomach, and the casual possession of that grip, the way she holds onto me even in sleep, undoes something I didn't know was still locked.
I'll say it. Soon. When the timing is less about adrenaline and more about choosing her in the quiet, the way she chose me in the chaos.
I close my eyes and let the sound of her breathing pull me toward sleep.
The desert outside holds the cemetery and the headstone and the name carved in granite that started all of this.
For the first time since that last phone call with Grant, I'm not bracing for what comes next. I'm reaching for it.