26. Grant
TWENTY-SIX
GRANT
The miles peeled away under my truck's tires like something being shed, and I kept my eyes on the highway and my hands loose on the wheel even though neither my hands nor my mind felt loose at all.
Three hours. One hundred and ninety-some miles of flat interstate and then a dog-leg turn onto state roads that narrowed the further you got from anything that called itself a city. Jessika’s with her phone pressed against her chest like she was trying to keep whatever was inside it from escaping.
“We’re going to find a safe spot for Morgan, any ideas?”
“Yep we’re taking him to Vance Ranch. That’s the safest place I know.”
“What? Really? He doesn’t know them.”
“Do you want him safe?”
“Of course.”
“Then he’s going to the ranch.”
Now Jessika sat in the passenger seat with her knees pulled up and her boots on the dash, watching the landscape through the window with an expression I couldn't fully read.
Some of it was relief. Some of it was the particular anxiety of a person who has been waiting for bad news for so long that good news feels like a trap.
"He sounded all right?" I asked. Not for the first time.
"He sounded tired," she said. Not for the first time.
I nodded. I reached over and touched the back of her hand, just once, and she turned her palm up and held on.
We found Morgan at the same location, since we told him to stay put, and he did.
I pulled in slow and parked parallel to the cabin shed, not right up on him, giving the man room. I'd been told enough about the last eight months to understand that Morgan was going to need room. You didn't hide that long without your nervous system rearranging itself around caution.
The door opened and Jessika was out before the engine finished ticking. I got out on my side and stayed there, leaning against the truck bed, watching the reunion happen for the second time without inserting myself into it.
Jessika hit him at a half-jog and he caught her, and I watched Morgan close his eyes and hold his sister and breathe, and I looked away because that moment didn't belong to me.
I busied myself checking the rear of the truck bed, making sure the tarp was secure over the supplies I brought, food, a change of clothes in the right size that Jessika had estimated, a burner phone still in the packaging. When I looked up again, Morgan was watching me over Jessika's shoulder.
I walked over and offered my hand. “Morgan, you're all right now."
Morgan shook it. His grip was firm, careful, the grip of a man who'd learned to assess people in the first three seconds. “I missed ya’ll," he said.
"I hope so."
"All good." A pause. "You sure about this? Taking me somewhere? I don't want to bring anything down on your people."
I looked at him steadily. "My people can handle themselves. Let's get you in the truck."
Morgan slept somewhere around the ninety-minute mark.
I had half expected it, the body surrenders when it finally decides it's safe, sometimes without asking permission.
I watched it happen in the rearview mirror, the man's chin dropping, his shoulders releasing a tension they'd probably been holding since before autumn.
Jessika reached back between the seats and squeezed her brother's knee once, gently, and then faced forward.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
"You don't have to keep saying that."
"I'll keep saying it as long as I mean it."
I let that sit. Outside, the landscape had shifted from interstate shoulders to two-lane roads lined with cedar and live oak, the sky opening up the way it only did out here, big and pale blue and indifferent to everything beneath it.
I knew this land. I'd grown up in it, grown into it, left it and come back to it the way men always seem to come back to the specific geography that made them.
I thought about calling ahead. I already sent a text to Beau, short, the way Beau preferred: Coming in with two passengers. One needs to stay awhile. Nothing hot on the trail. Beau had replied with a single word: Gate's open.
That was Beau. Economy of language that somehow never felt cold.
What I hadn't anticipated, what I was still processing as the truck turned onto the county road that would take us to Vance Ranch, was the second text that had come in an hour later. Not from Beau. From Jonah.
Heard you're bringing someone in. You might want to know, we've been looking for him too. Morgan. Don't freak out. Explain when you get here.
I read it twice, then put the phone face-down in the cupholder and stared at the road and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say at seventy miles an hour with a sleeping man in the back seat.
The gate was open, as promised.
The ranch road was a mile of packed caliche that wound through cedar breaks and came out into the open ground where the house and the outbuildings sat, the big house that had been our father's and was now Beau’s and his brothers, the bunkhouse, the equipment barn, Jonah and Kioni's smaller house set back toward the tree line.
I'd grown up running this ground and I still felt the specific drop in my shoulders that happened every time I turned off the county road and the gate closed behind me.
I hadn't expected the trucks.
Three extra vehicles were parked in the yard.
I recognized Rhett's black pickup. I recognized the rental Caleb drove when he came down from the city, the one with the slightly-too-clean bumper that always made me want to scratch something into it.
And Logan's old Bronco, which meant Logan was here, which was notable because Logan was almost never here voluntarily.
I parked and sat for a moment.
“Is this the Vance Ranch?" Morgan asked from the back. Awake now, looking out at the house, the yard, the assembled vehicles.
“Yes, it is.”
I got out.
They came out of the house, not in any particular order, not organized, just suddenly there, filling the porch and then the yard.
Beau first, as always, the oldest and broadest of us, with Zahara's hand in his and her face bright with something that suggested she knew more than I did, which was par for the course.
Jonah behind him, Kioni's arm through his, and Jonah wearing that careful expression he got when he was managing something complicated.
Rhett and Monique came around the side of the house, Rhett wiping his hands on a rag, Monique already looking past me toward the truck with the kind of focused attention she turned on anything that required it.
Caleb and Logan came off the porch last, Caleb with his hands in his pockets, Logan with a coffee mug, both of them watching.
I opened the back door of the truck. "Morgan. Come on out."
Morgan stepped out onto the caliche and straightened up and looked at all of them, and my family looked back at him.
It was Jonah who moved first, which surprised me. Jonah crossed the yard in a few strides and stopped in front of Morgan and looked at him for a long moment.
"Eight months," Jonah said.
"Something like that," Morgan said carefully.
"We started looking for you in October." Jonah said it matter-of-factly, the way he said most things. "Beau and I. Then Rhett got involved. You're harder to find than you probably know. We were also looking for Grant.”
Morgan stared at him. "I don’t, why? Why were you looking for me?"
It was Beau who answered, stepping forward, his voice carrying the unhurried weight it always had.
"Because of what you know. And because the people trying to keep you quiet came close to some of ours.
That made it our business." He paused. "You're safe here.
That's the only thing that matters right now. "
I watched my brother say it and felt the thing I always felt when Beau spoke with that particular finality, a kind of settling, like a door closing on the wind.
Jessika had come around the truck and was standing at Morgan's side. She looked at me with wide eyes, asking me silently if I'd known, and I shook my head slightly: No.
Logan stepped off the porch and handed his coffee mug to Caleb without looking at him. He walked over to Morgan and stuck out his hand. "Logan Vance. Ignore everything they say about me." He glanced sideways at me. "You didn't know we were looking, did you?"
"Just found out."
Logan grinned in that infuriating way he had. "So we got there at the same time from completely different directions. That's almost poetic."
"Don't," I said.
Kioni had come forward and was speaking quietly to Jessika, one hand on her arm, practical and warm the way Kioni always was, already moving toward the house and what came next, food, rest, the particular comfort of a kitchen with something on the stove.
Monique had her phone out and was already making a call, stepped away to the edge of the yard, and I knew without asking that she was calling whoever needed to be called, that Rhett had put that in motion before my truck had finished parking.
I stood in the yard and looked at Morgan, who was looking at all of us with the expression of a man who had been alone so long that the presence of this many people, all of them apparently on his side, had temporarily shorted something out behind his eyes.
"Come inside," I said. "Let's get you fed. Then we'll talk about everything else."
Morgan looked at me. Then he looked at Jessika, who nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
We walked toward the house. Caleb fell in beside me, still holding Logan's coffee mug, and said quietly, "For what it's worth, Beau's been driving himself half-crazy over this for months."
"He didn't tell me."
"He didn't want to worry you." Caleb paused. "Also he figured you'd find your own way in eventually. You always do."
I said nothing. I looked at the back of Morgan walking through the door of the house that had always been the place you came to when you had nowhere else to go, and Jessika's hand finding her brother's arm as the screen door swung shut behind them.
The gate was closed. The trucks were all in the yard.