Chapter 19
Logan
“Frank still hasn’t lost any weight,” Lark said, updating the chart on the kennel door. “Which means he’s either plateaued or he’s found a secret food source I haven’t located yet.”
“My money’s on the secret food source.” Nothing mattered more to that dog than finding any possible source of food.
“Obviously. I’m thinking of putting a camera on his kennel. Like a wildlife documentary. What does Frank do when the humans aren’t watching? We’d have a million views within a week.”
She capped the pen and moved to the next chart. Her hands were already reaching for the clipboard before she’d finished hanging the first one back.
“Also, I want to try a new enrichment rotation for the barn cats. Puzzle feeders instead of the scatter boards. Princess Whiskers destroyed the last one, obviously, because she believes physical labor is beneath her, but the rest of them actually engaged.”
I glanced over at Lark, but she was moving across the barn.
She’d been doing this for three days. Talking in schedules and plans and animal logistics, filling every pause with the next update until there was no room left for anything else. She laughed when she was supposed to laugh. She touched my arm when she walked past me in the barn. Nothing unusual.
She was performing Lark so well that anyone else would have bought it without question, but I’d stopped buying it two days ago.
Something had shifted, and the shift was in her.
She changed subjects a beat too fast. Her smile showed up on time but left early.
Yesterday in the kitchen, she’d reached for the junk drawer and pulled her hand back so quick she knocked her coffee mug sideways.
She’d laughed that off too, but the laughter was hiding something and we both knew it.
I thought we were past her carrying things alone. She’d been letting me in, piece by piece, and I’d been learning how to hold what she handed me without trying to fix everything before she’d finished talking.
But whatever had shifted, she’d decided to go backward on that.
After morning rounds, I went to her house to fix a pantry door latch that had been sticking. Lark was in the east paddock with Duchess. I could see her through the kitchen window, leaning against the rail with her hand on the mare’s neck.
The latch needed a Phillips-head. Lark kept a screwdriver in the kitchen junk drawer. She’d mentioned it twice and both times added that she kept meaning to put it back in the toolbox.
I pulled the drawer open.
The screwdriver was there, wedged under a tangle of rubber bands and a roll of duct tape and a flashlight with a cracked lens. So was a sheet of heavy white paper with Pinnacle Property Group across the top.
I knew that name. The company that had bought her second mortgage and wouldn’t give her any slack on the late payments. The paper was thick, formal, the kind that came with language designed to end arguments before they started.
Maybe I shouldn’t have read it. But whatever it said had been stuffed in a junk drawer instead of on the counter where she left things that needed to be dealt with. Things we’d been dealing with together the past couple weeks.
I read it. Then read it again to make sure I understood.
Pinnacle Property Group was exercising the acceleration clause in the mortgage contract. The entire outstanding balance of the second mortgage was due in full within thirty days. This wasn’t the late payments. This was the whole loan. Every dollar.
And the letter was in the junk drawer, buried, in a place nobody would look unless they needed a screwdriver Lark kept meaning to put away.
I set the letter back where I’d found it. Closed the drawer.
She’d hidden it from me for three days.
I stood in her kitchen with my hands on the counter and looked out the window.
Lark was still in the paddock with Duchess, her forehead tipped against the mare’s jaw, talking to her about something.
From here, she looked steady. Solid. Like a woman with forty acres under her feet and nothing pulling the ground out from under them.
I turned back to the pantry latch and had it fixed in ten minutes. I put the screwdriver back in the drawer and closed it again and went out to check the water troughs because I needed something to do with my hands while my head caught up.
Lark and I did evening rounds together. We fed the animals, checked water levels, updated charts.
She made pasta and I set the table, and we sat across from each other and talked about the enrichment rotation and whether Clarence had picked up a new, particularly foul word from the farrier or if he’d come up with that one on his own.
I sat there with that mortgage info lodged in my head and smiled when she smiled and kept the conversation going and felt every second of what it cost to hold something this heavy while pretending my hands were empty.
She’d been doing this for three days. I lasted one dinner and understood exactly why she looked tired.
Lark’s breathing had gone steady an hour ago. Tova was on the floor near the door, a still shape in the shadows. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. The letter was in the next room, and the woman who’d hidden it was six inches from my shoulder.
Somewhere between the pasta and the pillow, I’d figured out why she hadn’t told me.
Me.
She hadn’t said anything about the letter because of what had happened in here.
The nightmares hadn’t stopped. They’d gotten less frequent, but Lark had been lying in this bed on the bad nights, watching Tova end up on my chest and pull me back from wherever I went.
More than once. Enough times that she’d stopped asking if I was okay afterward and started just putting her hand on my chest until my breathing leveled out.
She’d seen what I carried at night and decided I didn’t have room for what she was carrying too.
The fact that she might not be entirely wrong burned more than if she’d been completely off base, and I fucking hated myself for it.
There was no way sleep was coming tonight, so I did what I’d done early on at Pawsitive when sleep wouldn’t come. I got up, pulled on boots and a jacket, and went outside.
Lark didn’t stir.
The property had its own life after midnight.
The barn settling into its frame, a low murmur from one of the horses, the tree line along the south boundary solid against the sky.
I walked past the paddock, past the equipment shed, heading toward the back pasture without a plan beyond putting my feet in motion and hoping my head would follow.
I still didn’t know how to bring up the letter. If I led with the fact that she’d hidden it, the conversation would become about my hurt, and that wasn’t the point. The point was whether we were actually doing this the way we said we were.
Together.
I was somewhere between the barn and the south fence line when I saw the lights.
Low. Near the ground. On the back acreage, close to where the access road came in from the county route. Two sources, maybe covered headlights, maybe flashlights. They were near the south boundary, close to the stretch of fence I’d found cut weeks ago.
Moving.
Not kids. Kids didn’t run covered headlights at two in the morning on someone else’s land. This was exactly what Hunter had told me to watch for. Activity. People on the property. Vehicles moving. His words: you see that, you call me, day or night.
Fuck. My phone was on the nightstand next to Lark’s bed.
I started moving toward the south fence line, keeping low, staying out of the open. I’d get closer. Get a count. Get some useful intel. Then get back to the house and make the call.
That was when I saw someone else. A figure crossing the open ground toward the back boundary. Fast. Coming from the direction of the house.
Goddamn it, it was Lark.
She’d probably woken up, gone looking for me, and had seen the same lights I had.
She was heading straight for them, and she had no idea what she was walking into.
She thought this was trespassers, maybe kids, something she could deal with by walking up and telling them to get the hell off her land.
She didn’t know about the drug operation running through the county.
She didn’t know her back acreage fit the profile of every staging point they’d been using.
She didn’t know because I’d never told her.
I ran toward her. Yelling wasn’t an option. At best, it was going to scare them off and we’d never catch them. That was, if they didn’t shoot first and ask questions later.
I had to reach her before she reached them.
I had a head start. I was closer to the boundary than she was, off to her east. I cut sideways across the open ground, angling to intercept her before she reached the tree line.
It was going to be close. I pushed for more speed.
There was no way to do this gently and not let her be seen by the drug runners.
I hit her in a low-flying tackle and twisted midair to take her weight, and we both went down hard about twenty yards from the tree line, my back absorbing the ground and her body landing on top of mine.
I got my hand over her mouth before she could make a sound.
She fought. Hard.
Her elbow drove into my ribs. Her teeth found the heel of my hand and bit down hard enough that I nearly let go. She was twisting under me, all fury and adrenaline, and I deserved every bit of it because a woman who just got tackled and pinned at two in the morning had every right to do damage.
“Lark.” I kept my voice barely above a whisper. “It’s me. You have to be quiet.”
She froze. Her breath came ragged against my palm. Her whole body was shaking.
I took my hand off her mouth. She shoved me sideways and scrambled back, putting distance between us.
“Logan?” Her whisper was raw. She was already on her feet. “What the hell are you doing?”
Behind us, the lights near the tree line were pulling back. The low grind of an engine moved away through the access road, heading for the county route. Whoever had been out there was leaving.