Chapter 2 #2
“Listen to me. You spent almost a decade of your life in this hellhole until you mustered up the courage to walk away, and I’m so proud of you for that, Grace.
” Unexpected tears start welling in Grace’s eyes at her words—she fights them off by gritting her teeth and exhaling deeply through her nostrils.
“But if you stay away, if you leave behind the thing you love the most because you’re scared, or hurting, or stubborn, well… ”
The neon sign above her head detailing the name of the run-down complex blinks in an uneven flicker, a death rattle of light. Grace’s voice is shaky as she asks, “Well, what?”
“You’d be lettin’ that rotten bastard win. Is that really something you want to do?”
Grace sighs, crouching down onto a curb and setting her forehead between her knees. She doesn’t respond right away, but she doesn’t have to. They both know the answer to that question, even if only one of them is brave enough to say it out loud.
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Restless, Grace lies in bed, trying and failing to balance the tip of her knife on her index finger.
She catches it each time it topples over, letting out long, dramatic trills through her lips whenever her eyes dance over to the upturned milk crate she’s using as a nightstand.
Renata’s card sits on top of a couple of dusty books, staring at her.
Grace sets the knife down atop her stomach and reaches for the card, impressed by the weight of it.
It feels and looks expensive—the looping letters of Renata’s name are perfectly placed and embossed. Her phone number is bordered in gold.
The sound of a drip near the tiny bathroom interrupts her examination, and Grace’s eyes flit upward.
The ceiling is patched with water stains; it wouldn’t be surprising for chunks of drywall to start tumbling down at any moment.
Above her, moldy ceiling, and below her, a ratty carpet, in the kind of condition that screams it’s seen things she can’t even begin to imagine.
And to top it off, her absolute favorite part of living here is sharing an extremely thin wall with Hutch Lawson, the circumstances of which seem to get worse with every passing night.
The man’s hand must be as soft as a baby’s bottom at this point.
Grace looks at her watch and sighs, knowing he’s probably settling down with his brick of a laptop and bottle of Vaseline right about now.
Like clockwork, she hears the telltale sound of a belt and jeans being unbuckled.
Tossing the card onto the milk crate and grabbing a pillow from the other side of the bed, Grace covers her face and ears with it, pushing as hard as she can to drown out the inevitable wet slapping sound that is soon to follow.
It doesn’t help. Hutch gets carried away, and when he does, he’s unconscionably loud.
With an annoyed grunt, Grace slams the pillow back onto the bed and sits up. She doesn’t think twice when she grabs the card and her cell phone and leaves the apartment, making sure to slam the door extra loudly behind her so Hutch knows he’s disturbed her evening again.
There are two options here: stay or go. As she paces back and forth in the parking lot for the second time that night, she weighs them carefully. She looks up at the stars, wishing she knew anything about constellations and what wisdom they might hold.
But then, from behind the door of the neighboring duplex, she hears Hutch yodel in ecstasy, and her decision is made.
She fishes her phone out of her pocket, dials the number on the card, and Renata Caldwell answers on the second ring.
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
A fraying bright orange duffel bag with a sticky zipper is packed to the gills with all of Grace’s belongings.
She doesn’t dwell on how sad it is that everything important in the world to her can fit in a ratty old gym bag—traveling light means it isn’t hard for her to be ready to go in thirty-six hours.
Three hard, booming knocks sound at her apartment door around 6 a.m., and she jolts slightly from her place at the edge of her unmade bed.
With the bag slung over her shoulder, she opens the door and finds a man who takes up most of the doorway with his imposing figure; if he weren’t hunched over with his elbow leaning against the doorframe, he’d knock his black cattleman hat off his head just by walking through.
“Hey,” Grace says softly, offering a hesitant half smile. “Good mornin’.”
Renata had mentioned she’d be unable to fetch Grace from Minetta herself but she’d be sending the ranch’s foreman, and “not to worry about” any sort of unfriendliness, because “grumpy is sort of his default setting.”
His voice is raspy and thick with sleep when he says, simply, “Are you Grace Underwood?”
“Yeah,” Grace says, and then follows quickly with: “Are you the foreman?”
The man lets out a little huff. “Among other things,” he says. “Let’s go.” He jerks his chin in the direction of her bag, beckoning with his hand for her to give it to him. She does, and then watches him toss it into the bed of a pristine, gigantic F-350 as though it’s stuffed with feathers.
Some trucks this size have the little step stool to assist the vertically challenged, but this one doesn’t.
Grace opens the passenger-side door and is sort of silently amping herself to jump up when a hulking figure appears at her side.
He looks younger in the dark, less severe under the softness of dawn, and there’s a slightly amused shine to his eyes that has her cheeks starting to pink.
She looks down to find his hand held out for her, and the fact that it looks proportionate in size to this behemoth of a truck he drives around, well—
“I can do it,” she argues, brow knitting together.
“I’m not gonna let you break your neck before we even get out of the parking lot,” he counters, his hand stretching farther in her direction. “C’mon. Up you go.”
She holds his stare, challenging him. When he doesn’t relent, she sighs and grabs on, unwilling to admit to herself or him that it’s much easier to climb while using him as leverage.
He holds on until she’s fully in, and when she looks back at him standing with his arm outstretched, their gazes lock for a brief moment.
Grace nods her thanks to him with a small smile, one he returns not with his mouth but with his eyes.
They’re dark, much like the rest of him, but they’re soft, somehow. Almost sparkling.
The truck smells clean and leathery, like it just rolled off the lot.
The seat squeaks as she slides into it, and she’s suddenly very aware of the permanent film of dirt that clings to her jeans no matter how many times she washes them.
The burly chauffeur slides into the driver’s seat without much effort, his long limbs lending to a swift, graceful movement.
As he gets himself situated, Grace takes a moment to survey him.
Before, she’d been so caught off guard by the sheer size of him—easily six foot three, maybe taller, and built like a damn linebacker—that she hadn’t noticed much else.
Now, she sees the black waves that stick out under his hat, the freckles and moles dotted across his cheeks and neck, and the way his jaw never seems to settle.
It works and works, and she wonders whether it’s a tic.
Or—more plausibly—something he does when he’s annoyed.
He starts the truck, then places a hand on the back of her headrest as he reverses out of the parking lot and onto the empty road that will lead them out of town.
Filling up silence with empty conversation has never been a compulsion of hers, but something about this man—the stern look on his face contrasting with the ease of his hands as he drives the truck, the way his black button-down hangs on his body like it was created specifically for him—she can’t help herself.
“So, you’re the foreman,” she repeats, then awkwardly clears her throat when he doesn’t acknowledge her. “Renata didn’t give me your name.”
His lips twitch. A subtle movement she would’ve missed had she not been staring directly at him. Grace blinks, waiting for him to say something. Anything. He glances at her quickly, then looks back at the road and says, “Crew. Crew Caldwell.”
Grace’s mouth drops open. Wait. “Caldwell, like—”
“Like Renata Caldwell is my mother.”
“Oh,” Grace says, a bit dumbstruck. She’d considered going to the library to google the Caldwells and Halcyon Ranch the day before, but decided any research would only make her more nervous. She’s regretting that decision with every bone in her body right now. “I didn’t realize.”
He looks at her again, more appraising this time. “Where’re you coming from?”
Leaning back a bit farther into her seat, Grace clasps her hands together in her lap, gripping her fingers a little too hard. “Braxton Ranch, out near Hopeland.”
Crew’s brows pull together, and whatever semblance of a smile he’d worn moments ago starts to sour. “Braxton Ranch, as in Bellamy Whitlock’s Braxton Ranch?”
Looking away, Grace looks out into the endless, open road ahead. “Did your mother not tell you how she found me?”
“I didn’t ask,” he admits. A beat of quiet, and then, “But I’m askin’ now.”
Grace’s lips press into a line, and she starts to wring her hands together, tugging at the scarred skin on her palms. In a quieter voice, she says, “Bellamy’s my uncle.”
Silence hangs between them for a long moment. Grace wishes the radio was on—a droning AM station would be better than this tense, unrelenting silence. Eventually, he asks, “He do that to you?”
She looks up and notices him staring at her hands, which are unfortunately illuminated in the dim blue light of the truck cab. The keloid scars are thick, pink, and obvious to anyone with eyes. She immediately turns her hands over, pressing them into her jeans.
“Not directly,” she says, digging her stubby nails into the denim.
“Well, it all makes sense now,” Crew muses.
Grace prickles a little. “What makes sense?”
With a slight lift of his shoulder, he says, “You’re not the first lost soul Renata Caldwell has tried to save. I’ve made this drive plenty of times.”
“From Minetta?”
“Minetta, Swift, Bellhaven, Ingram—hell, I’ve gone as far as Waco before. All the places your kind like to wander.”
Grace pins him with a look, but his eyes remain on the road. “My kind?”
“Y’know,” he says, reaching over her to fiddle with the glove box.
She pushes back into her seat, trying to maintain as much distance between them as possible as he pulls it open and grabs hold of a bag of sunflower seeds.
He hauls the bag out and then holds the open end up to his mouth.
With a handful of seeds muffling his voice, he says, “The runnin’ kind. ”
It irks her, how he thinks he’s pegged her so well—how she must be a dime a dozen in his eyes, and how this trial is starting to sound more like a charity project.
A pity party for the mistreated cowgirl.
She considers telling him to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, because she didn’t run from Bellamy Whitlock.
She walked away with bloody hands and her chin high.
She fought tooth and nail to get far away from Hopeland, almost dying in the process.
She rewrote her own history, erasing the Whitlock name from the narrative.
Crew must sense some inkling of the tension vibrating under her skin, because before she can throw back her own snide assessment of him, he reaches across the center console and offers her the open bag.
Grace looks at it, looks at him, then reaches in and grabs a handful of seeds.
At some point, he, too, must tire of the silence, because he flips on the radio and hits the scan button until he finds an old Waylon Jennings song he seems to be okay with.
Grace watches him do this, and two things occur to her: One, he may be the only person on planet Earth who still listens to the radio, and two, he has the music taste of a sixty-year-old man.
Every few minutes, he rolls the window down and spits out shells, only to quickly refill with another shake of the bag into his mouth.
Grace follows suit, happy to have something to do besides stew in her own melancholy.
Around the four-hour mark, she has cottonmouth from the salty seeds and her legs are aching to stretch. She looks around and behind them, seeing nothing but vast, verdant hills and endless blue sky. Sitting back in her seat, she looks over to Crew. “How long till we get to the ranch?”
He smirks as he turns a seed over between his teeth. “You’re already here.”