CHAPTER 28 #3
She watched him go still down there, hand resting on Diesel's neck, head turned up toward the rise.
He couldn't read her at this distance. But she could feel him reading the fact of her, parked and not coming, and after a moment he ducked out through the rails and started up the slope toward her, unhurried, that barely-there hitch in his walk that meant he was tired, and she put the truck in gear and rolled down to meet him because sitting still and being come-to was unbearable.
They met by the gate to the working pens. She didn't get out. She put the window down and that was all.
“Hey.” He came up to the door, forearms on the sill, close, and the smell of him came in with the dust, horse and sweat and warm skin, and her whole traitor body recognized it.
There was a smudge of round-pen dirt along his jaw.
His storm-grey eyes went over her face and the easy line of his mouth changed.
“You look like hell, darlin'. What's wrong?”
“Don't.” The word came out so quiet it stopped him cold.
He drew back an inch. “Laney.”
She looked at him. She made her face nothing and her voice nothing and she asked the only question she'd come to ask, the one she'd told herself the whole drive she would not ask, and asked anyway.
“Was Tom on Sutton's Bridge the night of the wreck.”
It was not a question. She'd dropped the lift off the end of it on purpose. She watched his face the way she watched a foal take its first breath, watched for the thing the body did before the mind could dress it.
And he hesitated.
It was a small thing. A heartbeat. Half a heartbeat.
His thumb came up and dragged once across the white scar through his right eyebrow, that tell of his she knew better than she knew her own, the thing his hand did when he was deciding which version of the truth to hand her, and in that half-second the grey light of that hallway came all the way down inside her and bleached the last of the color out of everything.
“Where'd you hear that,” he said, low.
He hadn't reached for a denial or a flat lie or even who told you. He'd asked where'd you hear that, the careful question of a man finding out how much you already knew before he decided how much to give you.
“That's not an answer.”
“Laney, it's—” The long sentence started up in him, she could hear it gathering, the run-on that came when feeling got out ahead of him. “It's not a thing you can ask in a driveway, it's not a yes or a no, there's a whole night behind it and I need you to let me—”
“It is exactly a yes or a no.” Her hands were steady on the wheel. So steady. “Was my father on that bridge.”
He stopped. His jaw worked. And he didn't say no.
“Yeah,” he said finally, rough. “He was there. But Laney, you don't have the—”
“Two years.” She heard her own voice from somewhere above herself, flat and clean as a blade laid on a tray.
“I buried him two years ago and you didn't come, and these last weeks I told you things I haven't told anyone, and the whole time you knew my father was on that bridge, and you let me not know.” She put the truck back in gear. “You let me not know, Beck.”
“I was trying to find the right way to—”
“There isn't a right way to keep that. There's just keeping it.” She looked at him one more time, the dirt on his jaw, the panic in the grey eyes, the hand that wanted to reach through the window and didn't dare.
“I'd have stood with you through almost anything.
You only had to say it. You only ever had to say the true thing and you couldn't, because saying the true thing means staying for what comes after, and that was never your strong suit, was it.”
“Laney—”
She drove.
She didn't look in the mirror. She crossed the cattle guard going too fast, the rails banging under the tires, dust rolling up gold and ordinary behind her into a day that still had no idea anything had ended, and she made herself breathe in the four-count Tom taught her for the bad calls, in for four, hold, out for four, assess, rule out, act.
Her chest was tight. That's not grief, she told herself, the old trick, the only trick she had.
That's a sympathetic response. Elevated heart rate, shallow respiration, that's adrenaline, that's the body, that's not—
Her hands were too steady on the wheel.
That was the tell. She knew her own body the way she knew every body, and the stillness in her hands wasn't calm, it was the stillness of a thing clamped down hard over a bleed it couldn't find the source of, and somewhere past the county road the clamp slipped, just for a mile or two, just enough, and the honest version came through underneath the clinical one the way it always eventually did.
You knew better, it said, in her own plain voice, not Tom's. You had him diagnosed a decade back and you were right. You handed your trust to a man whose whole entire talent was leaving, and you knew, you knew better, and you did it anyway because you wanted the fire, and now look.
The grey light of that hall was still in the truck with her. It had ridden home on her hands.
She didn't go to the clinic. She drove past the turn, past the lane, out toward nothing in particular, just to keep the wheels moving, because as long as she was driving away she was choosing the distance, and choosing it felt, for the length of the county road, almost exactly like safety.