Chapter 10 #3
"Grant is both. And if you think keeping his name clinical helps me distance myself from the fact that someone wrote 'handled' next to it in a filing cabinet, you're wrong.
I say his name like a mission because if I say it like a sister, I'll stop being able to function, and I can't afford that right now. "
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
I turn back to the window. The mountains are beginning to turn gold in the light, indifferent to the wreckage in this kitchen.
My hands are braced on the counter, my knuckles white, and the reflection in the window glass shows a man I barely recognize.
"We finish the investigation," I say, finally. "We find Rainey. We get the evidence to Torres. After that, I don't know what we are. I don't know if I can trust you. I don't know if I can look at you without seeing the lie."
"I understand."
"You don't understand a goddamn thing." I push off the counter and face her. "You look at me with your brother's eyes and you ask me to understand. You carry his face and his stubbornness and you sleep in my bed and then you tell me you're his sister, and you think I can just process that?"
"I think you can process it while we drive to Creede tomorrow, or you can process it while you stand here being angry. One of those options gets us closer to the people who killed Grant. The other one doesn't."
She's using my own argument against me, the same focus-on-the-mission logic I've been running on for months. And she's right, which makes it worse.
We stand in the kitchen, ten feet apart, the evidence printouts spread between us on the table like a map of everything that went wrong. The light shifts. The coffee goes cold. The mountain shadows creep across the floor.
I don't forgive her. I can't. The lie is too deep, too personal, too tangled in the grief and guilt I've been carrying since the night I drove to Las Cruces and arrived too late.
But I don't tell her to leave again, either.
The rest of the day passes in a silence that feels like breathing through gauze. We eat canned soup heated on the stove, bread from the freezer, and water because neither of us wants more coffee. We sit at opposite ends of the table and don't look at each other.
When it's time to sleep, she takes the bedroom without asking.
I grab a blanket from the hall closet and stretch out on the couch.
The leather is cold and the cushions are too short for my frame, and my boots are on the floor and my hat is on the coffee table and the door between us stays open, which feels like a concession from both sides.
I stare at the ceiling and try to separate what's real from what's a lie and find that the line has become so blurred I can't see it anymore.
The moments come back uninvited, reshuffled and relit by the truth.
The first night in Albuquerque, when she argued with me about the investigation timeline and I thought she was invested because she was a good journalist. She was invested because someone murdered her brother.
The diner in Santa Fe, when she slid spreadsheets across the table with hands that shook so slightly I almost didn't notice. I thought it was caffeine. It was rage.
The way she flinched, barely, almost invisibly, every time I said Grant's name with the casual possessiveness of a man who considered Grant his loss and nobody else's.
She let me have that. She sat across from me and listened to me claim her brother's death as my personal tragedy, and she didn't say a word.
In the bunkhouse. I told her nobody touches you, and I meant it with everything I had. I meant it about Merrick, about Thornton, about every threat on this circuit.
I didn't know I was also talking about Grant's little sister, the one person in the world he would have killed me for touching.
And the way she looked at me after, in the dark, with the blanket pulled up and the night pressing against the windows.
I thought she was looking at me. She was looking at the man who was supposed to protect her brother and didn't.
She's Grant's sister.
The woman who set my world on fire is the last living piece of the best friend I ever had, and every single moment between us was built on a foundation of deception so complete that I don't know which parts survive the truth.
And my body doesn't care. That's the part I can't make peace with. I know who she is now. I know every word out of her mouth for the last several weeks has been wrapped in a lie.
I still want her. I can still feel the ghost of her pressed against me, the way she fits into the curve of my body like she was engineered for the space.
The wanting hasn't stopped. It just has teeth now.
I turn onto my side. Through the open doorway, I hear her breathing. She's not sleeping. She's just breathing, keeping herself together in the dark the same way I am.
Two people who loved Grant, tearing each other apart over the wreckage he left behind.
Creede is six hours north. Rainey is somewhere at the end of that drive. The investigation doesn't stop because two people can't stand to be in the same room.
I close my eyes and listen to Kenna breathe through the open door, and the quiet between us does more damage than the yelling did.