Chapter 12 #2
He didn’t know how to tell her what he saw when he looked at her.
He wasn’t good with words that involved feelings.
But what he saw in Bonnie’s face right now was courage.
The quiet, unglamorous kind. The kind that showed up with a spiral notebook and a plan because falling apart wasn’t an option when you had two kids and a town to run.
“One more thing,” he said.
She looked up from her notes. “What?”
“None of this can change how you behave at work. You can’t tip him off. If you suddenly start acting differently—nervous, distracted, cold toward him—he may notice.”
She snorted. “Lucas is a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. He would notice in a heartbeat.”
“Can you do it?” he asked. “Sit across from him every day, knowing what you know, and not let it show?”
“I’ve been sitting across from people and not letting things show for four years,” she said. “I’m very good at it.”
There it was again. An oblique reference to the Brent secret. And again, he let it go. She would tell him when she was ready. He was a patient man.
“You should go back to the office,” he said. “Before your lunch break runs long enough for anyone to notice.”
She stood and slid the notebook into her bag. Zipped her coat. Paused at the doorway.
“Gray?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for showing me the truth. Even though it was terrible. Thank you for not trying to protect me from it.”
He met her gaze and held it. “You deserve the truth. You’ve always deserved it.”
She held his gaze for a beat longer. Then she turned and walked through the engine bay, her footsteps echoing off the clean concrete floor he’d swept and scrubbed and polished because finishing things and maintaining things was the opposite of what his father had done.
He heard her car start. Heard it pull out of the lot. Heard the sound fade until the station was quiet again.
He went back to his textbook. The words still wouldn’t cooperate. He opened his laptop instead and pulled up his spreadsheet tracking Jenna’s calving situation. Numbers. He could do numbers right now.
Tucker was waiting for him by the ambulance when Gray arrived at four o’clock for his Tuesday driving shift.
His brother was leaning against the rear bumper with his arms crossed, but Tucker had the same restless energy as always, the faint vibration of a man whose internal engine never quite idled.
“You look like hell,” Tucker said by way of greeting.
“Good afternoon to you, too.”
“Did you sleep last night?”
“Enough.”
“Liar. But that’s your business.” He tossed Gray the ambulance keys. “We’ve got a transfer to Apple Pie Creek. Non-emergency. Eighty-five-year-old with a hip replacement follow-up.”
Gray caught the keys and climbed into the driver’s seat.
Driving the ambulance was the one part of his day that required his full attention in a way that crowded everything else out. The vehicle was large enough to demand respect and just unwieldy enough to keep him honest. It wasn’t the fire engine, but it still required focus.
Focus was good. Focus was the thing he’d relied on his whole life when everything else felt uncertain.
They picked up Mrs. Olafsen from her house. She was a tiny woman with a titanium hip and strong feelings about the current state of the county’s road maintenance. She shared those feelings in vivid detail for the entire thirty-five-minute drive to Apple Pie Creek.
She’d insisted on being loaded onto a gurney even though she was perfectly capable of sitting in a seat, saying, “I’m eighty-five. I’ve earned the right to lie down in a moving vehicle.”
Once inside the ambulance, she announced, “The potholes on Highway 12 are big enough to lose a Buick in.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tucker said from the back, adjusting her pillow.
“And tell your brother to slow down. I’m not in any rush to die.”
“I’m doing thirty-five,” Gray called back.
“Thirty-five is too fast for these roads. The county commissioner should be ashamed.”
Tucker caught Gray’s eye in the rearview mirror and grinned. Gray grinned back.
This was good. Driving, helping, being useful. The simplicity of transporting a woman with a titanium hip and a feisty attitude from point A to point B. No evidence. No cover-ups. No enigmatic woman with hazel eyes carrying a secret she wasn’t ready to tell him.
Just a road, a destination, and a job that needed doing.
By the time they dropped Mrs. Olafsen at the rehab center and drove back to the Foster Ranch, the sun was low and the mountains had turned the bruised purple of late afternoon in Montana.
Gray swung by the calving barn to check on the cows before heading back to the bunkhouse. Sully met him with a look on his face that Gray had come to recognize as Sully’s version of cautious optimism.
“Induced two more today,” Sully reported. “Both ended up being natural deliveries. Cows and calves all healthy. One bull calf, one heifer.”
“Weights?”
“Ninety-eight and one-oh-five.”
“That’s on the smaller end for this group.” Gray pulled out his notebook and recorded the numbers. “Which cows?”
“Numbers 14 and 22.”
Gray nodded, mentally updating the tally. Fourteen calves born so far, eighteen more to go. Five C-sections, nine natural births. All cows and calves healthy. Better than anyone had hoped.
“Dillon ran the numbers on projected market weight for the first crop of steers,” Sully said. He leaned against the barn’s sliding door and looked out at the pasture where the calving mothers grazed in the fading light. “Jenna about fell over.”
“In a good way?”
“In a way where she swore out loud and then sat down very fast.” Sully grinned fondly. “The Charolais cross is going to put serious weight on these animals. Jenna and I talked it over, and we’re going to keep the heifers as breeding stock.”
Gray looked at the nearest calf—a big cream-colored heifer lying in the straw beside her mother, legs folded neatly, blinking at the world with the serene calm. “Sometimes a disaster turns out to be a windfall in disguise.”
“That’s unusually philosophical for a man who practically runs on spreadsheets,” Sully observed.
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain a frightening number of notebooks is what you contain.”
Gray smiled. His first genuine smile of the day.
He checked on Blizzard, who was getting bigger by the day and already developing the muscular chest of his Charolais sire, and strolled back to the bunkhouse as the last daylight drained from the sky.
In his room he opened his laptop and pulled up the evidence file he’d been building for Cooper. He added today’s notes: Bonnie’s agreement to search the mayor’s files. The insurance report as the primary target. Cooper’s timeline for tracing the email addresses.
His phone buzzed with a text from Bonnie. The mayor didn’t come back after lunch. His office was empty all afternoon.
He read it twice. She was telling him something specific. The mayor’s absence meant she’d had the office to herself.
A second text: I found something. Can we meet tomorrow?
His pulse kicked up. He typed back: Same place. Noon?
Her reply was immediate: Perfect. I’ll bring lunch.
Three people, circling the same terrible truth from different angles. She had the access. He had the analysis. Cooper had the investigative skill to turn raw evidence into a case that could survive scrutiny.
Together, they were going to unravel what Lucas Shoemacher had built and buried.
He read all evening, catching up on the homework that had eluded him recently. At midnight, he turned off the light and lay in the dark, listening to the wind move across the Montana front range. In the calving barn, a newborn calf bawled for its mother. The sound was thin and urgent and alive.
He thought about how Bonnie showed up at the station with a plan and refusing to take no for an answer. And he thought about how she’d said partners. The word had sounded like both a declaration and a leap of faith.
He picked up his phone and typed one more message. Deleted it. Typed it again. Sent it before he could talk himself out of it.
You’re the bravest person I know.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Her answer came back: That’s either awesome or alarming. I’m not sure which.
He recognized her words from the storage unit, weeks ago, when she’d teased him about his memory. He liked the fact that she remembered. The fact that she could still be funny after some of the worst days of her life.
He typed: Most people land on awesome, eventually.
She sent back a single emoji. A coffee cup.
He set the phone on the nightstand and closed his eyes. Sleep, when it came, was deep and dreamless.