CHAPTER 22 #2
“You've got time for eggs.” Diane finally looked at her, and there it was, the thing Laney had been bracing against and dreading and, she realized, wanting — her mother's clear green eyes, so like her own, reading her over the top of the reading glasses on their chain.
Whatever Diane saw, it softened her mouth.
She reached across the counter and touched Laney's cheek, one rough warm thumb against the freckles, the way she'd done when Laney was six and feverish, the way she'd done at Tom's graveside two years ago when Laney had stood there gone so still and calm she'd frightened the whole town.
“You look like yourself,” Diane said quietly. “First time in a long while, baby girl. You look like there's somebody home behind your eyes.”
“Mama.”
“I'm not saying anything.” Diane straightened, brisk again, but her hand lingered a half-second longer.
“I'm just an old woman pouring coffee. But your daddy left fire in you, Laney.
I've watched you spend two years proving you could bank it down to nothing and call that strength.” She glanced once at Beck, who had gone very carefully still at the end of the counter, holding his coffee, not pretending he couldn't hear.
“Strength's not the banking down. I had that part wrong too, for a while.
Strength's letting it burn where folks can see.”
It was as close to a blessing as Diane Cross would ever come, and Laney felt it land somewhere under her ribs, warm and enormous and terrifying, and she did the only thing she could do, which was nod once and look down into the coffee steam rising off her cup so her mother wouldn't see her eyes go wet.
“Eggs,” Diane said, and went to the griddle, and that was that.
Beck slid onto the stool beside Laney. Under the counter, where the town couldn't see, his knee pressed warm against hers and stayed.
“Your mama,” he said low, “is a more dangerous woman than Sterling Vance.”
“By a wide margin,” Laney agreed, and they sat there in the coffee steam and the griddle-smell with the cold gray glass throwing the empty street back at them, and for the space of one whole breakfast she let herself be, simply, a woman having eggs with her man on a Thursday morning.
Ordinary. Unremarkable. The most reckless thing she'd let herself do in longer than she cared to count.
It was the warmth that did it. It was the warmth that gave her the nerve.
Because somewhere in the second cup, with Beck's knee against hers and her mother's blessing still glowing in her chest and the future she'd let herself imagine still hanging behind her eyes like an afterimage of the dawn, Laney understood that if she was going to let herself want this — really want it, build on it, plan mornings around it — then she could not keep the hole in the floor of it covered over. She was a diagnostician.
She did not build a treatment plan on a chart with a blank in the middle of it.
And there was a blank. There had been a blank since the morning she'd sat in the clinic loft with the dust-and-lavender of her father's logs around her and opened the envelope she'd been afraid of for two years and read the thing she could not un-read.
Tom's truck. On Sutton's Bridge. The night of the wreck.
She set down her fork.
“Beck.” She kept her voice level, the triage voice, the one she used to tell an owner the news was bad. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.” He said it easy, still half-smiling, reaching for the salt.
“The night you left.” She watched his hand stop, an inch off the shaker.
She watched it the way she watched a horse's eye for the white.
“The wreck. At Sutton's Bridge.” She made herself say it all the way, no flinching, the way her father had taught her to palpate the place that hurt and not the place that didn't. “My dad was out there that night. Wasn't he. His truck.”
For a long moment the diner sounds went on around them — the griddle's hiss, the percolator, the bell over the door as a rancher came in stamping dust off his boots — and Beck did not say anything at all.
She had learned to read bodies before faces. She read his now.
She saw the easy go out of his shoulders first, the loose Thursday-morning ease draining out of him like water out of a cracked tank.
She saw his jaw set. She saw — and this was the part that lodged, the part she would turn over and over in the dark for days afterward — she saw his thumb come up, slow, and drag once across the white split through his right eyebrow, and then drop, like he'd caught himself doing it.
She didn't know yet, not in words, what that tell meant. She only knew her own chest had gone cold around it.
“Laney.” He turned his coffee cup a half-turn on its saucer, not drinking it, not looking at her. “That's a long time ago.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the answer I've got this morning.” And he tried to find the smile again, the deflecting easy thing, the joke that was his whole life's exit, and for the first time in three weeks it didn't reach his eyes.
“Some things you don't go diggin' up before nine a.m., darlin'.
Some things you leave where they're buried.”