Chapter 20 #2
That's not McKenna moving fast and clumsy. That's McKenna moving slow and exact, the way they've been moving through everything since a rodeo I can still feel in my shoulder some mornings.
I text Dawson the finding. He responds in under a minute: Which campaign office?
I pull the metadata. The answer sits there in small grey text, unglamorous and completely damning.
Missoula.
I text Knox from my desk before I pack up: Missoula. Come over tonight.
His reply takes a while, long enough that I know he was in the middle of something he couldn't drop. When it comes it's short: Wrapping up with Holt. On my way.
I text him the gate code without being asked, because I already know he'll get there before I do.
He does. His truck is parked in front of my house when I pull up, the evening sun still high enough to throw long gold light across the hood.
He's out of it before I've fully stopped.
He's moving a little stiff on the left side, favoring the stitches even now.
There's a tightness around his eyes, the grey gone flinty, carrying something heavier than it was this morning.
Not anger. Just a man who's been running on too little sleep and too much adrenaline and hasn't let himself stop long enough to feel either.
He reaches me before I've closed my door. His hand goes to my jaw, tilting my face up, his eyes moving over me like he's checking for damage he can't see. Whatever he finds settles something in him. His shoulders drop half an inch.
"You're okay," he says, more verdict than question.
"I'm okay."
"Good." He presses his mouth to mine for a long beat, unhurried, like the day earns him this much before anything else gets to happen. Then he lets go. "Tell me about Missoula."
"After food. I've been running on coffee and spite since six."
"Spite's not a food group."
"It's gotten me through worse days than this one."
He follows me into my house, a grocery bag in his hand. Backstrap from his own cattle, cut thick, the kind of marbling that only comes from an animal raised right. A bundle of asparagus. A bottle of Opus One pulled from his own cellar, label barely worn.
In my kitchen he sets the bag on the counter and takes his hat off, out of habit more than manners, tossing it onto a chair.
His hair falls forward when he does it, dark and shiny under the overhead light, a little too long now, curling faintly at the collar in a way that makes my hands itch before I've decided they're allowed to.
I go to him and get both hands in it before I've fully thought it through, pull him down half an inch, and he lets me.
His hands find my hips. Not moving, just anchoring.
He holds there with me a beat longer than either of us needs, his eyes on mine the whole time, like he's daring me to let go first.
I let go first. Barely.
"Glasses," I say, mostly to give myself something to do with my hands that isn't touching him.
He watches me cross to the cabinet, and I feel it, a physical thing, weight without contact. When I turn back with two glasses and the wine key, he hasn't moved, just leaning against my counter in the August heat. I lose the thread of whatever I was going to say next.
The t-shirt is soft and worn thin from washing and it does absolutely nothing to hide what's underneath it. His shoulders fill it out the way good tailoring never manages to, the fabric pulled taut across his chest, and his forearms are bare all the way up, dark ink catching in the evening glow.
I hand him the wine key instead of using it myself, purely so I have an excuse to stand close while he works the cork, close enough to see the tattoos on his forearm shift when the muscle underneath moves. I want my mouth on all of it.
"You're staring," he says, not looking up from the cork.
"I'm allowed."
"Yes, you are." The cork comes free with a soft pop. He pours without spilling a drop and hands me my glass. "And I'm going to enjoy it."
He is completely unbothered, standing in my kitchen in a shirt two sizes too flattering with his hair a mess from my hands and a body built like it was engineered specifically to make me stop finishing sentences. I take my wine and don't apologize for any of it.
We eat at the table on my back patio. The sun is going down behind Broken Sky in long bands of orange fading into pink, the deep blue coming up behind the purple ridgeline. Neither of us says anything for a moment. We just watch it, because it's the kind of sky that asks you to.
"Every damn night and I still stop for it," Knox says finally, cutting into his steak.
"Every damn night," I agree.
"You'd think a man who's seen it his whole life would stop noticing."
"You'd think." I look at him instead of the mountain. "I haven't stopped noticing you either, for what it's worth."
He goes still, fork halfway to his mouth, and the look he gives me is worth more than the sunset.
We don't talk about the document or the campaign office or anything with McKenna's fingerprints on it.
He asks about Whiskey Girl instead, whether she's still favoring her left front the way she was after the fall, and I tell him she's fine.
For a while we are just two people eating steak on a porch instead of the wreckage of everything else.
Afterward, in the kitchen, I don't want to talk first. I want to feel something that isn't fear, something with weight and heat and a pulse under my palm that tells me the world hasn't come completely apart. Knox reads that off me without a single question and gives me exactly what I came home for.
Later, tangled in my sheets with my head on his chest and his hand slow in my hair, I tell him about the campaign office file. He goes very still, the stillness that means he's remembering something for later use, and I feel it land in him quiet and permanent.
"Missoula," he says.
"Missoula," I confirm.
He doesn't say anything else. He doesn't have to. We both know what this means. Whoever framed me didn't do it from Rimrock. The trail we've been following in circles has finally given us a place instead of a name.
I fall asleep with his heartbeat under my ear and the word sitting between us like a door we haven't opened yet.
By morning it's the only thing either of us can talk about.