31. Jessika
THIRTY-ONE
JESSIKA
Eli disappears on a Thursday.
He was supposed to come to the ranch for the afternoon and he doesn't show, and Grant who has the broken arm in a cast and should be resting goes very quiet in the way that means he's afraid.
"I'll find him," Grant says.
"You should?—"
"I'll find him."
He goes. I stay at the ranch with my father and the rebuilt routine and the sick particular worry of watching someone you love go toward a thing that might hurt them.
He calls me at nine.
"He's okay," he says. But his voice is not okay. "He went to a party. Some of the older kids. I've got him."
"Where are you?"
"Twenty minutes away."
They come in through the back door. Eli is sixteen shades of terrible, pale, scared, something in his eyes that reads as the aftermath of a scare that got real.
Grant is behind him, carrying himself very carefully because the arm hurts more than he admits, and his face is the still, controlled face of someone managing a great deal at once.
I make tea, Nova would be proud, and set it in front of Eli without comment.
He wraps his hands around the mug.
Grant and I stand in the kitchen while Eli stares at the tea.
"Someone had drugs at the party," Grant says carefully. To me, not to Eli. "Eli didn't use. He called me when he understood what was happening."
"I know who it was," Eli says. Quietly. "Who had them."
I look at him.
"The same guy from before," he says. "Ricky Hale."
Grant goes very still.
"He said—" Eli's voice tightens. "He said to tell Grant that the planted evidence was just the beginning."
Silence.
"Planted evidence," I say.
Grant's jaw works.
"I found something in my garage last week," Grant says. His voice is completely level. "Drugs, in a toolbox I hadn't opened in six months. I removed them." He meets my eyes. "I didn't tell you because I was managing how I reacted to it."
"Grant."
"I went to a meeting. I handled it."
I look at him. At the carefully maintained control. At the arm in the cast. At the specific exhaustion of a man who has been protecting everyone around him from knowing how much is actually hitting him.
"You don't have to do that alone," I say.
"I know."
"Do you?"
A beat.
He looks at me.
"It's—" He stops. "I don't want to be the problem," he says. Very quietly. "I don't want to be the thing that makes everything harder."
"You are not the problem," I say. "Holcomb is the problem.
Collins was the problem. Hale is the problem.
" I cross the kitchen and put my hand on his face, the same thing he does for me sometimes, the specific language of it.
"You are the only person in this county who has been consistently trying to make things better. "
His eyes are very complicated.
"Jessika—"
"If you start saying you're not worth?—"
"I was going to say thank you," he says quietly.
I hold his gaze.
"Okay," I say. "You're welcome."
We look at each other for a moment.
Eli, at the table, says into his tea: "This is awkward, you guys know I'm still here."
Grant turns to him. "Yeah. I know."
"Are you—" Eli looks between us. "Are you okay?"
Grant looks at me.
"Yeah," he says. "I think we are."