Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Presley
Dakota texts me for the first time since the truth came out, stopping me cold in the middle of the feed aisle.
Breakfast tomorrow. We need to talk.
I read it four times standing there with a fifty-pound bag of range cubes over my shoulder, sure I've got the wrong Dakota, sure it's a mistake, sure the next text is going to be ‘sorry, meant that for Grace.’
But it isn't.
The next one comes a second later.
The diner across from the ranch. 8am. Grace too. It's important.
And then, after a pause long enough that I can picture her thumbs hovering, hating it:
Please.
Dakota Lyle doesn't say please to me.
Hell, Dakota hasn't said much of anything to me since a hospital hallway where she looked at my mother's face on mine and turned to stone.
So I stand there in the feed store with my heart going sideways, and I text back the only thing there is to text.
I'll be there.
* * *
The diner across from the ranch has been there longer than any of us, a low cinderblock place with vinyl booths and a coffee pot that never stops.
It's the kind of spot where half the county eats breakfast so nobody looks twice at three of Phantom Lyle's kids taking the big corner booth.
I get there first, because of course I do, because I've been ready since six out of pure nerves.
Grace comes in second, Braxton in a carrier and Waylon walking beside her.
She sets Braxton’s car seat in the booth beside her, and she gives me a real smile and a "hey, you" that steadies me some.
Then Dakota.
She stops just inside the door when she sees me, and for a second the old stone flickers across her face, the reflex of a woman who taught herself to hate the sight of me.
Then she pushes it down, visibly, with effort, and she comes and slides into the booth across from mine and says, stiff as a fence post, "Thanks for comin'."
"Course."
"Where's Shiver?" Grace asks.
Dakota sets her phone in the middle of the table and hits a button, and my brother's voice comes out of it, tinny and warm. "I'm here. Ridin' shotgun in my own kitchen. Y'all order yet? Get me a coffee in spirit."
We order like we're feeding an army, because that's what you do when you're about to talk about something nobody wants to talk about—you bury it under food.
Belgian waffles, a short stack, sausage and bacon both, a mess of scrambled eggs, hash browns, a basket of biscuits with gravy on the side.
The waitress doesn't blink.
The table fills up with more than four people can eat and we all pick at it, and the phone sits in the middle with Shiver breathing on the other end, and for a few minutes we just... eat.
Pass the syrup.
Comment on the food.
Dakota cuts Grace's sausage without being asked because Grace has got a fussing newborn on her arm, and it's such an ordinary sisterly thing that it puts a lump in my throat.
For a while we don't talk about why we're here at all.
Grace tells a story about Waylon flushing one of Shadow's socks down the toilet and the plumber's face when he fished it out.
Dakota laughs so hard she has to put her coffee down, and Shiver's voice off the phone demands to know why nobody sends him this kind of material.
For a few minutes it's almost like it used to be, back before the spring, back when I was still drunk on the miracle of suddenly having sisters at all.
I'd forgotten this part.
In the months since the freeze-out I'd let myself forget that before it all broke, we were good.
That having sisters, after twenty years of being an only child talking to my daddy's ashes, was the best thing that ever landed in my lap.
We lost all of that in an afternoon.
And sitting here now, watching Dakota wipe laugh-tears off her face and reach over to jiggle Braxton's foot, I understand exactly how much I've been starving, and exactly how careful I have to be not to let it show.
If I let them see how badly I've missed this, I might not stop crying long enough to get through what we actually came here to do.
Grace catches me watching. She doesn't say anything.
She just bumps my knee with hers under the table, once, and goes back to her eggs, and it's the smallest thing, and it nearly finishes me.
Then Dakota sets down her fork and wipes her hands and says, low, "Okay. I'm gonna say it."
The table goes quiet. Even Braxton, like he knows.
"The investigator won't stop." Her jaw is tight.
"I've called him off four times. Told him the family's moved on, told him to drop it, told him I don't need him anymore.
He won't. He says—" she glances around, drops her voice further, "—he says he found a discrepancy in the timeline he can't let go of.
That the story of where Mom went doesn't hold up.
And he's right, it doesn't hold up, because it's not true, because we all know exactly where she?—"
She stops. Breathes. "He's going to keep pulling until he finds something. And we all know what's out there to find."
Nobody says the word. We don't have to.
It sits in the middle of the table next to the syrup, that shallow patch of ground out past Big Spring, and every one of us can see it.
Grace speaks up then, quiet, rocking Braxton without looking down at him.
"I've gone back and forth on this more times than I can count," she says.
"Part of me wants it all out. The truth, finally, no more secrets, let the law sort it and let the chips fall.
I'm so tired of what the lie's already cost us. "
She looks at her sons, then at each of us. "But then I look at them. I think about Waylon and Braxton growing up with their granddad in prison, and Marlena too, the whole family torn up in the papers, everybody in three counties knowing our business. And I think about Mom."
Her voice thins.
"She died a long time before her body went into the ground. She wasn’t the woman who raised us. She lost herself when Pops moved on. She let it consume her. Putting Dad in prison doesn't give her back. It just makes a second tragedy out of the first one."
She swallows. "So I'm in. God help me, I'm in. We bury it."
"So here's where I'm at," Dakota goes on, and her voice shakes just slightly, "and I hate it. I want you all to know I hate it so much I could scream. But I've been up every night for two weeks turning it over, and there's only one way this ends that doesn't end with Dad in prison."
"We lie to him," Grace says quietly.
"We lie to him." Dakota nods. "I give him a story so complete he's got no thread left to pull.
I tell him I found her myself. I made contact.
She's alive, she's fine, she was out of the country the whole time, Mexico, someplace, somewhere with bad cell service and no reason to call home, and she doesn't want to be found, and the family's made peace with it, and the case is closed.
Final payment, thank you for your service, we're done. "
Shiver's voice comes off the phone, heavy. "You think he'll buy it?"
"He'll buy it if I sell it right. He wants to close it too, deep down. Nobody wants to be the man who kept digging on a family that asked him to stop."
Dakota's eyes come up, and they land on me, and there's something raw in them. "But I need us all agreed. Because if we do this, we're—" She can't finish it.
"We're doing what Dad did," I say.
It comes out of me before I can stop it, and the table looks at me, and I hold Dakota's eyes because somebody has to say it out loud.
"We're doing exactly what Dad did," I say again, quieter.
"We're burying it. We're lying to protect the people we love. Every ounce of the hate we've been carrying for him this whole time, for covering it up, for keeping the secret, and we're about to pick up that same shovel."
My throat's tight. "I'm not saying don't. I'm saying let's at least be honest with each other about what we're becoming, because I don't think I can stand one more lie in this family that we don't at least tell each other the truth about first."
The silence stretches.
And then Dakota—Dakota, who hasn't looked at me with anything but stone in months— lets out a broken little breath and says, "God. You sound just like him. The good parts of him."
She scrubs a hand under her eyes. "You're right. That's exactly what we're doing. And I've spent months hating him for it and hating—" She stops. Looks at me.
Something in her face finally, finally cracks all the way open. "Hating you. For having her face. For being the proof of what he did. And you didn't do a single thing except get born to the wrong people, and I took it out on you because you were safer to hate than he was."
"Dakota."
"No, let me—" She holds up a hand, and her eyes are streaming now, silent and furious at herself.
"I owe you this, and I've owed it for months.
I'm sorry, Presley. What we did to you, freezing you out, treating you like you killed our mother—you lost as much as we did that day.
You found out your whole life was a lie same as us.
And you lost your sisters on top of it, and that part's on me and Grace, and it wasn't fair, and I'm sorry. "
Grace's hand finds mine under the table.
And across a diner booth loaded with waffles going cold, my sister Dakota looks at me and stops being a stranger.
"I don't know how to fix it fast," she says, wiping her face. "I'm still—I'm a mess, I'm angry all the time, I'm not gonna be normal overnight. But I don't want you frozen out anymore. I want my sister back. If you'll still have us after how we've been."
"Are you kidding?" My own face is wet now. "Dakota, I've been dying out here. Yes. God, yes."
Braxton picks that exact moment to let out a squawk, breaking us all open into wet laughter, and Shiver's voice comes off the phone roughly, "Y'all are cryin' in a diner without me. This is exactly why I hate bein' the one on the phone."
Grace hands me the baby without asking.
She just passes him across the table into my arms, warm and furious and impossibly small.
It's the first time she's let me hold him outside a hospital room, and I know exactly what she's saying by doing it.