Chapter 52
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
"I need to check on Speed," Brody said Sunday afternoon.
"Then let's go."
"Cool." He fished his keys from the bowl on the counter—one of the few finished surfaces in this house—and jingled them in my direction. "I'll drive."
"No, you won't." I plucked them from his hand.
"Excuse me?"
"You're not drivin'. Not today."
He opened his mouth. I raised a brow. He closed his mouth.
"Fine." He held up both hands. "But I'm controllin' the radio."
"You can control the volume. That's it."
We were five minutes down Route 89, Brody fiddling with the dial and landing on something twangy I pretended to hate, when my phone buzzed in the cupholder.
I glanced at the screen. Picked it up.
"Hey, Hank."
Brody's head whipped toward me so fast I thought he'd give himself whiplash. "Why does Hank have your number?" he whisper-shouted.
I ignored him.
"Yeah, I hear you," I said into the phone. "We're headed out there now, actually." I paused to listen to the old man on the other end before confirming. "You sure he's up for it?"
Brody was burning a hole into the side of my head with the way he was staring so hard, like he'd been personally betrayed. I put a hand over the microphone. "Stop."
"Hank"— he mouthed, pointing at my phone like it was evidence in a murder trial—"has your number."
I went back to the call. "That sounds good. We'll meet you there." Another pause, shorter. "Yeah, Hank. I'll tell him." I hung up and set the phone back in the cupholder.
Brody waited approximately two seconds. "Well?"
"John wanted to check in on us. Hank picked him up from the facility this morning. They're headed to the ranch."
Brody went quiet. He looked out the passenger window at the hills rolling past, golden and dry in the late summer light.
"His first time back," he said.
"Yeah." My hands tightened on the wheel. "First time in twenty-two years."
When we pulled up, Rhett was on the porch, sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs with a mug of coffee sitting on the arm.
He looked like he'd been there a while.
He looked like he hadn't slept.
"Hey," I said, climbing the porch steps. Brody was right behind me, his hand finding the small of my back without thought. "You good?"
Rhett's jaw worked once before he answered. "Yep."
He was not good.
I scanned the porch. The front door. The quiet that was too quiet for a ranch house, even on a Sunday.
"Where's Sassy?"
Rhett's eyes stayed fixed on some middle distance, passed the paddock, passed the barn, passed whatever he was actually looking at.
"Gone."
Brody's hand pressed harder against my back. "Whaddya mean, gone?"
"Left a note." Rhett took a slow sip of his coffee, like he needed the time to string together the words that might explain. "Said she was movin' to Bozeman for a while. Finish her last semester there."
The silence that followed was heavy enough to sit in.
I stared at Rhett. This man—this steady, dependable, unshakeable man—had cracks running through him this afternoon that he was holding together with nothing but caffeine and sheer cowboy stubbornness.
"That little shit," I said. "Tellin' me not to run when she was just about to."
Something flickered across Rhett's face. Not quite a smile. But close enough that I knew the words had landed where I'd aimed them—at the part of him that needed to know someone else was pissed about it, too.
He stood, draining the last of his coffee, and tipped his chin toward the drive. "Who's that?"
I turned. An old Chevy was making its way up the gravel road, moving at a pace that suggested the driver was either very cautious or very old.
"That's Hank," I said. "He's got my granddad with him."
Rhett looked at me. Then at Brody. Then back at me.
"Your granddad," he repeated.
"Yep."
Hank's truck rumbled to a stop in front of the house. The passenger door opened slowly, and my granddad eased himself out with careful, deliberate movements. He planted his boots on the gravel and stood there for a long moment, looking up at the house, the barn, the mountains behind them.
I watched him take it in—the place he'd built, the place he'd lost, the place that had kept going without him the way places do. His jaw was tight. His eyes were bright. He didn't say a word.
Hank appeared beside him, toothpick in the corner of his mouth, one hand hovering near John's elbow without quite touching it. Ready if needed. Not presuming.
I walked down the steps and crossed the yard to him.
"Hey, Granddad."
He looked at me, and for a second, his face did the thing it had done the first time I'd shown up at his door—that quick, gruff battle between emotion and pride, pride winning by a hair.
"Vinny." He patted my arm once, firm. "Place looks different."
"New barn," I said. "Same dirt."
"Same dirt," he agreed.
Rhett had followed us down. He stood a few paces back, hat in hand, the way cowboys did when they were showing respect without being told to. John's sharp eyes found him and gave him a long, appraising once-over—the kind that took a man's full measure in about three seconds.
"You must be the foreman," John said.
"Yes, sir. Rhett Calloway."
John extended his hand. Rhett took it.
"Your daddy bought this ranch from me twenty-two years ago."
Rhett's hand stilled mid-shake. His eyes cut to me—quick, sharp—and the math did itself right there on his face. He let go of John's hand slowly.
"Calvin is your granddaughter," he said. Not a question.
"She is."
Rhett studied me. I held his gaze and gave him nothing, because there was nothing to give that he wasn't already figuring out on his own.
"Makes it feel kinda like you're my sister, but not?" he said, almost to himself. Then he shook his head. "I don't know, that's weird."
"Little bit," I said.
But the warmth in his voice when he said it—clumsy and genuine and reaching for the right words without quite finding them—loosened something in my chest that I hadn't realized was still wound tight.
The screen door banged.
We all turned.
Mr. Calloway stood on the porch in his robe, one slipper, and the walking boot that had recently replaced his cast. He had a whiskey in his hand, looking like he'd come outside expecting nothing more complicated than continuing his drunken Sunday and had just been proven catastrophically wrong.
His eyes found John Calvin and went wide.
"John." The name came out like it had been knocked loose. "What the hell are you doin' here?"
"Visitin' my granddaughter." John's voice was even, but there was an edge to it. "Got a problem with that, Mike?"
Mr. Calloway's gaze shifted to me and his nostrils flared. "It's Michael."
I choked back a snort.
He came down off the porch, moving with stiff-backed posture. He stopped to stand next to Rhett.
"No problem at all." His grin was oily—so much like the ones I'd seen growing up—as he looked my way. "Just happy I could be the one to reunite so many family members."
"How'd you know who I was?" I asked. "And why'd you tell Denny I was here?"
Everyone went silent. Even Hank's toothpick stopped moving.
Mr. Calloway shifted his weight. His jaw tightened the way men's jaws tightened when they were deciding between the truth and something more convenient.
"Your daddy called me years ago," he said. "Said if his daughter ever turned up in Larkspur, to let him know." He cleared his throat. "Had a feelin' you'd end up here someday."
"So you did." My voice was flat. Steady. "You picked up the phone and told a man—a man you didn't know a goddamn thing about—exactly where to find me."
"He's your father, Calvin. He had a right to—"
"He had no right." John's voice cut through like a blade on a whetstone.
The old man had gone rigid beside me, every line of his body pulled taut with a fury that had burned slow for longer than I'd been alive.
"That man never had a right to a damn thing where my granddaughter is concerned.
You know what kind of man Denny Jennings is? Do you?"
Mr. Calloway opened his mouth.
"He's the kind of man who took a twelve-year-old girl who'd just lost her mother and dragged her across the country behind a rodeo circuit because she was useful to him.
" John's voice was shaking now—not with weakness, but with frustration.
He'd spent twenty-two years in a facility with nothing but time and regret and the quiet, gnawing knowledge that he'd failed the people who needed him most. "And you handed her right back to him. "
The yard was dead quiet. A horse nickered softly from somewhere in the barn. The sun was starting its initial descent, throwing long shadows across the gravel, and nobody moved.
Mr. Calloway's face had turned a sickening shade of gray. "I didn't know all that. He said he just wanted to know she was safe—"
"Don't." Rhett's voice was low and dangerous in a way I'd only heard once before—the day Brody had gotten in his face about Sassy.
But this was different. This was directed at his own father, and it carried the weight of a lifetime of things Rhett had swallowed and was no longer willing to keep down.
"Don't stand there and act like you did this girl a favor. "
"Rhett—"
"You had a woman workin' on your ranch—my ranch—and you knew who she was the whole goddamn time.
Knew her family owned this land before you ever set foot on it.
And instead of sayin' a word to me, to her, to anyone, you picked up the phone and called the one person she'd spent half her life runnin' from. "
Mr. Calloway's mouth was a thin, hard line. "I didn't know she was runnin'—"
"You didn't ask." Rhett took a step forward.
His voice hadn't risen, and somehow that was worse.
"That's the thing with you. You never fuckin' ask.
You just decide what's right and do it and let everybody else deal with the wreckage.
" His chest was heaving now, the stoic mask cracking at the edges. "Elena. Mom. And now this."
The name hung in the air—Elena, the sister Mr. Calloway had kept from Rhett, the secret that had already blown this family apart once.