Chapter 9
Gray accidentally read Cassidy’s notebook Saturday afternoon in the most undignified way possible.
He was on his stomach under the fire engine, reaching blindly for a socket wrench he’d set on the running board a few minutes before, and he knocked Cassidy’s spiral notebook off the running board where she must’ve left it.
The notebook landed open on the concrete floor, face up, approximately four inches from his nose.
The entry at the top of the open page was written in lettering large enough to read from orbit.
Gray blinked at the page.
The entry above it read: Day 21: Mom wore her hair down today. She only does that when she’s not stressed. Her hair was up in a bun again by the time she left the fire station. Conclusion: the fire station stresses Mom out, but she keeps coming back. Why? Only logical answer: to hang out with Gray.
He shut the notebook guiltily and rolled to his back.
Cassidy wasn’t wrong about him, which forced him to assume she was right about Bonnie as well. Did Bonnie like him a lot? And hang out here just to be with him?
But it was the pattern beneath the entries that got to him. Not what she was recording. Why she was recording it.
He knew exactly what she was doing. Not just the notebook, not just the careful tracking of his behavior. He knew the reason for it. She was testing him.
Is this person going to stay?
He knew because he’d done the exact same thing as a kid. He’d checked the driveway every morning, looking for his dad’s truck. He’d listened for stumbling, unsteady footsteps passing his bedroom door in the dark hours before dawn.
One morning, the footsteps weren’t there.
He didn’t remember the morning itself. But he remembered the silence. A house-shaped absence where his father used to be.
He set Cassidy’s notebook back on the running board. Retrieved his socket wrench.
Was he ready to step into the footsteps of a parent figure? To be there day in and day out for Noah and Cassidy? Commit to never walking away? He understood better than most the scale of the questions and the enormity of their answers.
He didn’t say anything about it when Cassidy reclaimed her notebook and slid it into her backpack as if it contained nothing more interesting than math homework. He didn’t need to say anything. The only answer was the one he’d already been giving, every day, without knowing he was being graded.
He kept showing up.
Later that afternoon, he drove Bonnie’s kids home from the fire station while Bonnie dealt with a last minute problem at work.
It had become a routine over the past couple of weeks without either of them formally establishing it. Bonnie worked on Saturdays because Lucas was never in the office on weekends and she could catch up on the backlog of his neglected work.
Gray was at the station anyway, and Cassidy and Noah had taken to hanging around there after school or on weekends, doing homework in the day room while Gray worked on the engine or studied.
Noah rode shotgun in Gray’s pickup, his question notebook open on his lap, a pencil behind each ear.
“I have one more question on today’s list,” Noah said casually.
“Beware, Gray,” Cassidy said from the back seat. “He told me at breakfast he has a big closer question today.”
“You’re not supposed to tell people it’s the closer,” Noah declared, outraged. “That ruins the impact.”
Gray bit back a smile. “I’ll pretend I don’t know it’s coming and I’ll say the first thing that comes to mind. Hit me with your best shot, Noah.”
“If you could fix one thing in the whole world that’s broken, what would you fix?”
“I’d fix the thing where people leave without saying goodbye.” It was out of his mouth before he had time to apply any filters. The question had, indeed, caught him off guard—Noah’s questions often did—and the honest answer slipped through the gap between thinking and speaking.
In the rearview mirror, Cassidy’s pen stopped moving.
Noah, mercifully, did not possess his sister’s talent for reading subtext. He wrinkled his nose. “Like when someone leaves a party without saying bye?”
“Something like that,” Gray said.
“That is rude,” Noah agreed and wrote the answer down.
Cassidy said nothing. But when Gray glanced in the mirror, she was looking at him with what he could swear was sympathy.
“I just thought of another question,” Noah announced brightly. “Do cows know their names?”
“Yes,” Gray said, grateful for the subject change. “Research shows that dairy cows respond to individual names and produce more milk when they’re called by name. They also have best friends and get stressed when they’re separated from them.”
“Cows have best friends?”
“They do. They groom each other and stand close together. Some cows refuse to eat if their friend is removed from the herd.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” Noah said, his face crumpling with the swift, unguarded empathy of a seven-year-old.
“It’s also one of the most hopeful things you’ll ever hear,” Gray replied. “It means the capacity for loyalty and attachment isn’t uniquely human. A lot of species are wired to need each other.”
“Why do people get sad?” Noah asked, without looking up from his notebook.
Gray glanced at him. The question had arrived with the casual velocity of all of Noah’s questions, but this one carried weight that the seven-year-old might or might not have intended.
“Lots of reasons,” Gray said carefully. “Sometimes because something sad or bad happened. Sometimes because they miss someone. Sometimes because they’re carrying something heavy and they haven’t figured out how to put it down yet.”
“Like a backpack that’s too full?”
“Exactly like that. Sometimes the heavy stuff is invisible, though, so other people can’t always tell when someone is carrying a lot.”
Noah processed this. “Mom carries a lot.”
“Your mom is one of the strongest people I’ve ever met,” Gray said. It came out with more feeling than he’d intended. In the mirror, Cassidy’s gaze locked on him again.
“She is,” Noah agreed matter-of-factly. He moved on to his next last question, which involved whether or not sharks could smell fear, and Gray was blessedly on solid scientific ground again.
He pulled into Bonnie’s driveway and parked. The ranch house was small and tidy with a covered porch. A child’s bicycle lay on its side near the garage. Crocuses were pushing up through a patch of dirty snow by the front steps—first brave flowers of the year, refusing to wait for permission.
Noah jumped out of the truck and ran up the porch steps. Cassidy collected her backpack and paused before opening her door.
“Gray?”
“Yes?”
“That was a good answer. The one about fixing things.” She hesitated. “My dad left for a fire and didn’t say goodbye to us, either.”
The air in the truck went very still.
“I’m sorry, Cassidy.”
She nodded briskly, got out, and walked into the house with her shoulders straight, looking for all the world like a child who had everything under control.
Gray sat in the driveway for a minute after she went inside. The mountains turned from gold to pink to violet as the sun dropped behind them. Cassidy would have been five when she lost her father. The same age he’d been when his dad left.
He knew from personal experience that she wouldn’t remember much about her father in years to come. Whether that would turn out to be a blessing or a curse for her, only time would tell.
A sharp need came over him to be there for her down the road. He could help her find her way to peace with having lost her father so young because he’d lived through the same loss. Different circumstances, but losing a parent was losing a parent.
He turned off the truck and went inside to help Noah with his homework and to make the same offer he did every day, to help Cassidy if she got stuck on any of her homework. She never did, of course.
Cassidy insisted that she could look after Noah for an hour until their mom got home. But he declined her offer politely because leaving wasn’t something he did.
Sunday afternoon, he backed the fire engine into the bay.
Three times in a row.
Zero cones.
He’d set up the traffic cones in the same pattern as always: the configuration the Apple Pie Creek captain had marked on the pavement for him during his first humiliating lesson, the one that had ended with four flattened cones, a dented dumpster, and the pinochle group placing bets on his total cone count by the time he finally got the firetruck back into the bay the first time.
The cones stood upright and untouched after all three passes. Orange sentinels, perfectly aligned, their smugness almost audible.
Nobody saw it. Noah was at a friend’s birthday party and Cassidy was at the house reading. The pinochle group stayed home on Sundays. Even the usual birds in the parking lot had found somewhere better to be.
He sat in the engine after the third successful attempt and allowed himself a moment of deep satisfaction, made even sweeter by how big the challenge had been and how hard it had been to stick it out. But it had been worth every flattened cone, every joke he’d endured, every hour of frustration.
He pulled down the garage door and went back to his workspace in the training room.
The Shoemacher evidence was spread across the big round table. He’d pinned the blueprint copies to the wall with Tucker’s photographs arranged in a grid beside them. His notes, complete with citations and footnotes, filled a spiral notebook twice as thick as Noah’s.
He’d been over it. All of it. Dozens of times.
He had systematically eliminated every possible accidental explanation of how the fire started. All that remained was a single cause. Arson.
It was time to tell Bonnie.
Over the past two weeks, he’d asked her on three separate occasions if she was ready to sit down and walk through the evidence.
Each time, she’d refused. Not angrily, Bonnie didn’t do anger, at least not the kind that showed.
She deflected. Changed subject. Suddenly remembered an errand.
And each time, the set of her jaw said clearly enough for even him to get the message, I’m not ready for this conversation, and if you push, I’ll make you regret it.
He understood why. But the evidence was complete and he needed to turn it all over to Cooper and the sheriff. Soon. He’d already sat on it too long as it was.
He picked up his phone and typed Bonnie a text.
Can we meet tomorrow? At the fire station. You know why.
He hit send.
The reply came six minutes later. He knew because he counted every one of them.
Okay. 10AM. Kids will be in school.
He set the phone down in exactly two seconds of profound relief followed by a wave of near panic.
He ran both hands through his hair. Looked at the photographs, the blueprints, the timeline he’d drawn on a six-foot length of drawing paper and tacked on the wall, the diagrams. He was going to break her heart all over again tomorrow morning.
And her heart had already been broken once in the worst possible way.
He had every answer now except the one that mattered most: how to tell her without destroying her.