Chapter 69
Luke
She’s in the passenger seat. Bare feet on the dash. Coffee in one hand, phone in the other, scrolling through something David sent her that she’s already annoyed about.
“He wants another deck by Thursday,” she says. “A pitch deck. Not a deck deck. Though honestly at this point I could probably build either one.”
“You can’t build a deck.”
“I could learn.”
“You couldn’t.”
“I managed a hostage situation for three weeks. A deck is just wood and nails.”
“That’s exactly what you said about the porch. And then you called me.”
She looks at me. I look at the road. She goes back to her phone.
The road winds through the hills the way Texas roads do—never straight, never flat, never showing you what’s ahead until you’re already in it.
The sun is low and gold and sitting on everything like it owns the place.
Her hair is down. She’s not wearing shoes.
Just Marin. The version that only comes out in the truck with the windows down and nowhere to be.
She takes a sip of her coffee. Makes a face. It’s gone cold. She drinks it anyway because Marin can’t let things go. She holds on. Repurposes them. Drives them across state lines and chains them to a column if she has to.
She called me that first day. A stranger with a porch that needed fixing. She didn’t know about Emily or the silence or the house I couldn’t walk back into.
The road curves. She adjusts her feet on the dash. Frowns at something on her phone.
She just called. And kept calling. And gave me a reason to walk through a door I built with my own hands and thought I’d lost for good.
She didn’t know what she was doing. But she knew.
Now, we’re driving to Foster’s. She needs things. I need fence posts. This is what we do now—errands, coffee, the ordinary machinery of two people building a life on top of everything they buried.
She sets her phone down. Looks out the window. Looks at the radio.
Static. She’s been thinking about it for three miles. I can feel her hand wanting to reach for it the way I can feel a nail wanting to bend—the pressure before the thing happens.
She reaches over. Her fingers find the dial.
I don’t stop her.
She turns it. Past static. Past more static. Past something country she skips without comment. Past news. Past a preacher selling salvation at a discount. She stops just when I think she might turn it off altogether.
Patsy Cline.
Crazy.
She leaves it. Leans back. Coffee against her knee. Doesn’t say a word about what she just did. Because Marin doesn’t explain. She just does.
Patsy’s voice fills the truck—low, steady, certain.
A woman who let love make her crazy and sang about it like that was the only honest thing to do.
Like it was the only thing worth doing. There was a time when people did that.
Let it in. Let it cost them. Didn’t build walls around it or swipe past it or protect themselves out of ever feeling anything real.
They just loved somebody and it made them crazy and that was enough.
I drive.
The sun sinks lower. My tools rattle in the back. The woman next to me is singing Patsy Cline with her bare feet on my dash and her cold coffee in her hand and she has no idea she’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever met.
She tied me to a chair in a basement. I’d let her do it again.
I reach over and turn the volume up.