10. Grant
TEN
GRANT
The storm hits on a Friday.
I know it's coming the way I know most bad things are coming in Briar County, the air changes first, that specific barometric pressure drop that makes old injuries ache and animals uneasy, and by two in the afternoon the sky to the northwest has gone that particular greenish-grey that means something serious.
I close up the garage early and drive out to the ranch without calling ahead.
Jessika's car is there. Her father's old Dodge too.
Lights on in the house and the barn both, which tells me she's already doing storm prep.
I park and get out and go straight to the barn, where I find her with Presley, both of them moving horses from the east paddock to the covered stalls, rain starting in earnest now and the wind picking up hard.
She sees me and something in her face, relief, quickly controlled, moves and settles.
"The forecast is worse than they're saying," I tell her, taking the lead rope from her hands and walking Callie toward the open stall. "Get your father inside. I can finish this."
"I don't need?—"
"Presley." I look at her father. "You doing okay in this wind?"
He is, in fact, not steady. The cane is working hard on the wet grass. He looks at me with the proud stubbornness of a man who doesn't want to be managed and then at his own hands gripping the lead rope and makes the calculation.
"Jessika can help you," he says.
After he's in, it's just Jessika and me moving horses through worsening weather, a choreography we've never done together, but it comes together quickly because she's good at this, she knows these animals, and I know enough to follow her lead on her own horses while moving faster on the heavy work.
By the time the last horse is stalled and the barn doors secured, the storm is properly upon us. Rain hammering the metal roof in waves. The old trees around the property moving hard.
Inside the barn, with the storm loud on the walls and all six horses settled in their stalls, there's a particular quality of shelter. The way barns feel in bad weather, contained, warm, the smell of hay and animals and wood, the sound of the rain somewhere outside and not in here.
Jessika is at the far end checking the east wall's integrity where there's been previous water damage. I go to the supply room and find the water-resistant sealant and bring it to her and we work together without discussion, pressing sealant into the joints where the older boards have separated.
She's close. The barn is crowded with stalls and supply lines, not much room to work.
I hand her the sealant tube and our fingers brush.
She goes still for just a moment.
I'm aware of her the way I'm always aware of her when she's this close, a particular quality of attention that I've been working to keep contained since the night at the sheriff's station. She smells like rain and horse and something underneath both of those that's just her. Specific to her.
"Grant," she says. Her voice is very quiet. The storm loud around us.
"Yeah."
She's looking at the wall. Not at me.
"Tell me something true," she says. "Something you haven't told anyone."
A pause. "That's a wide request."
"I know." She finally looks at me. Her dark eyes are very direct in the low barn light, the loose curls damp from the rain around her face. "I've been very careful my whole life. About what I say. What I show." She pauses. "I don't think I know how to do this any other way anymore."
"Do what?"
"This." She makes a small gesture that encompasses, I think, the barn, the storm, the two of us, the last two weeks. "Figure out where we stand."
I look at her for a long moment.
"I thought about you," I say finally. "In prison. Not obsessively. But you were there. In my head." I pause. "I understood why you testified. I was still angry about it."
She holds my gaze. "Were. Past tense."
"The anger was clarifying, for a while. When I was getting clean. Easier to focus on than the rest of it."
"And now?"
"Now I look at you and I can't find the anger anymore." I say it flatly. Factual. "Which is inconvenient."
Something moves through her face, not quite a smile, but something that lives near a smile.
"Very inconvenient," she agrees softly.
She's leaning against the wall, and I'm beside her, and there's about eight inches of charged air between us that feels significantly less like distance than it is.
I should step back.
I'm aware of this. I'm aware of all the reasons this is complicated, the investigation, her daughter, her father, the thing between us that goes back years to when we were stupid teenagers making eyes at each other at rodeo events while Morgan played goalie and their father pretended not to notice.
I'm aware of it all.
Jessika looks at my mouth for just a moment, just one unguarded second, and then backs up.
Then her phone rings.
She startles. Pulls it from her pocket. Her face changes when she reads it.
"Nova," she says, and answers.
I step back.
The storm says something loud against the roof. I walk away to the far end of the barn, giving her space, checking on the horses methodically, and I hear her voice behind me. Where are you, no, stay there, don't—okay, okay, I hear you.”
When I turn back, her face is tight.
"Nova snuck out before the storm hit," she says. "She's at the Callister Road pull-off. Alone."
"I know where that is. Twenty minutes."
"In this weather?—"
"My truck can handle it." I'm already moving. "Stay here with the horses. I'll get her."
"I should?—"
"Your horses need a person here right now," I say. "I'll bring her back."
She looks at me for just a moment, that particular look of someone who is used to doing everything themselves being asked to let someone else do one thing.
"Okay," she says. "Okay. Thank you."
I find Nova twenty minutes later at the pull-off, sitting in the partial shelter of a hickory tree with her knees to her chest and her phone in both hands, very deliberately not looking scared. She's soaked. Her hoodie is dark with rain.
She gets in the truck without drama or explanation.
I turn the heat on high.
We drive back toward the ranch in the loudest part of the storm without talking, which is fine.
After about five minutes, Nova says: "I was supposed to meet someone out here."
"Who?"
"A girl from school. She didn't come." A pause. "She said her dad wouldn't let her out because of the storm, but I already left."
"Next time check the weather first."
"I know." She's quiet. "I'm not going to get a lecture?"
"Not from me."
She looks at me sideways. "Why not?"
"Because you already know you shouldn't be at a pull-off in a thunderstorm. Lecturing you would just be me talking to hear myself."
A pause.
"My dad would have lectured me for an hour," she says. Her voice is very neutral.
"Different people, different approaches."
"He's not—" She stops. "He's not bad. He just doesn't know what to do with me. He tries too hard and then gives up."
I don't answer. Some things don't need answering.
We pull into the ranch and run for the barn through the last hard edge of the storm, and Jessika is there with a towel already in her hands when we come through the door, wrapping it around Nova before she's fully inside.
Nova lets her, for once. She leans slightly into her mother's hands, and Jessika holds her tighter than the towel-task requires, and Nova lets that happen too.
I go back to checking the horses.
The barn wall on the north side, the one we weren't working on, something’s wrong with the latch on the gate that opens to the north pasture. I walk over and check.
The latch isn't malfunctioning.
It's been cut.
Clean, deliberate, the wire cleanly snipped so it would look like it held but wouldn't, and the gate is standing open three inches in the wind.
While we were doing storm prep.
While I was in the barn with Jessika and Presley was inside and Nova was gone.
Someone was on this property tonight.
I close the gate and secure it with a spare length of rope and I do not say anything to Jessika until the storm passes and Nova is in the house and I can speak to her alone.
But in the back of my mind, something hard and cold settles.
The vandalism on the barn. The photograph on the truck. And now this.
This is not a random grudge.
This is orchestrated.
And whoever is doing it knows exactly when to move.