Chapter 11 #2
The photography studio is at the west end of town, wedged between an outfitter and a café.
The sign above the door reads Willow Light Photography in hand-painted lettering, and the window displays a collection of landscape prints that are stunning in their precision and devastating in their loneliness.
Whoever shot them has a gift for capturing isolation.
I recognize the composition before I recognize the name. From what I’ve seen of her work, Rainey Weathers always shot with her subject slightly off-center, the empty space carrying as much meaning as the focal point. These prints have the same signature.
"That's her work," I say.
Colt parks the truck half a block down. He kills the engine and sits for a moment, both hands still on the wheel.
Then he does the thing that makes my chest ache even when I'm furious with him: he scans the street.
Left, right, rooftops, doorways, the alley between the outfitter and the studio.
Threat assessment. The same instinct that put his body between mine and an open parking lot the night my car was broken into.
He's checking for danger before he lets me walk toward it, and he's doing it without thinking, the way his lungs pull air. He can't stop protecting me, even now.
"What are you going to tell her about Grant?" he asks, once the street passes inspection.
The question catches me. I look at him, and his face is unguarded in a way I haven't seen since the morning he asked who I really was and the answer blew everything apart.
The anger is still there, banked coals beneath the surface, but layered over it is something rawer.
Fear, maybe. The fear of a man who lost his best friend and is about to sit across from the woman who loved him.
He cared about Grant the way I did, with a devotion that doesn't have a clean name.
"I'm going to tell her that Grant's sister came to find out what happened to him," I say. "And that the man Grant trusted most in the world came with me."
Colt's throat moves. He looks away, out the driver's side window, toward the mountains.
"Let's go," he says.
He's out of the truck and around to my side before I've finished gathering my bag.
He doesn't open the door for me because that would imply courtesy, but he positions himself between me and the street as we walk.
The gesture is so automatic and so possessive that I feel it in my spine, a hot, unwanted curl of awareness that I shove down where it can't do any damage.
The bell above the door chimes when we walk in. The studio is small, with a front gallery space and prints on the walls and a counter at the back. Behind the counter, a doorway leads to what looks like a processing area. The whole place smells like developer chemicals and mountain air.
The woman behind the counter is sorting prints into labeled bins with a system that involves color-coded sticky tabs and handwriting so precise it could be typeset.
She's thinner than the headshot on her studio website, her face sharper at the angles, with dark circles beneath her eyes that no amount of concealer could hide.
Her hair is pulled back in a messy knot, and she's wearing a flannel shirt two sizes too big that hangs off her frame like borrowed armor. A man's flannel. Grant's, probably.
A half-eaten granola bar sits on the counter beside a coffee mug that reads I shoot people for a living with a camera icon underneath. The mug is the only thing in the studio that looks like it belongs to a person rather than a ghost.
She looks up when the bell rings, and her customer service expression is already halfway in place when her gaze lands on me.
The expression vanishes. Her hands go still on the prints, and the color drains from her face so fast I can see it happening, a tide pulling out, leaving her skin the color of the paper in her hands.
"You look just like him," she whispers.
My composure holds, but just barely. The words hit the same bruise Flint's observation left, right in the soft tissue between who I am and who Grant was.
I nod. "I'm Kenna. Grant was my brother."
Rainey's hand finds the edge of the counter.
She grips it hard enough that her knuckles blanch, and I watch her process the information with the desperate speed of someone who's been waiting for this conversation and dreading it simultaneously.
Her eyes move to Colt, and recognition registers instantly.
"Colt Holloway." She says his name like a prayer or a curse, and I can't tell which.
"Rainey." His voice is low, careful, stripped of the aggression he's been wearing since he found out who I am.
The shift is so sudden it makes my breath catch.
This is a version of Colt I've only seen in glimpses: the man underneath the fury, the one who held my hand in a dark truck and didn't say a word because the word would have cost him everything. "We need to talk."
She looks at the door. I watch the calculation happen, the assessment of exits, the measurement of distance between herself and the back room. The instinct to run is written across her body in a language I recognize because I've spoken it myself.
"I'm not here to hurt you," I say. "I'm here because Grant can't be."
Her chin trembles, a quick, involuntary spasm, and she presses her lips together until the trembling transfers to her jaw.
"The studio is closed," she says, to no one, to the room.
She walks past us to the front door, flips the sign from OPEN to CLOSED, and locks the deadbolt.
Then she turns around, leans against the door, and starts crying.
Not the delicate kind, but the kind that comes from weeks of holding everything together alone in a town where nobody knows your real name, with the grief living in your chest like something you swallowed that won't dissolve.
I cross the room and put my arms around her. She's shaking so hard. Her teeth chatter against my shoulder, and she grips the back of my jacket with both fists like I'm the only solid thing in the room.
Colt stands near the counter and watches us.
The look on his face is the first honest thing I've seen from him since the morning before the kitchen blew apart.
His jaw is set, his eyes are bright, and the muscles in his forearms flex as his hands open and close at his sides.
He's fighting the same grief I am. We just carry it in different places.
When Rainey's breathing steadies, she pulls back and wipes her face with the sleeve of her oversized flannel.
"He talked about you all the time," she says to me. "His little sister. He said you were the smartest person he'd ever met and the most stubborn."
"He wasn't wrong about the stubborn part. I'm withholding judgment on the smart part, given that I'm currently standing in a Colorado mountain town having faked my way onto the rodeo circuit, so the jury's out on my intelligence."
Rainey's mouth curves into something fragile that could become a smile if the world were kinder.
"He loved you," she says to Colt. "You know that, right? You were his best friend. The night before Las Cruces, he told me that if anything happened, Colt would burn the world down to make it right."
Colt's voice, when it comes, is scraped raw. "I'm working on it."
Rainey leads us to the back room. A small table, two mismatched chairs, and a filing cabinet that she opens with a key from a chain around her neck. She tells us everything.
The photographs. The financial documents Grant traced.
Vic's confession that was recorded on Grant's phone before the recording disappeared.
The evidence package she and Flint assembled in the weeks before Las Cruces, copied three times, distributed between her van, Flint's safe, and a safety deposit box in Albuquerque.
"The van copies were destroyed," Rainey says.
"My van was trashed at a fairgrounds before Las Cruces.
Someone smashed the windows, slashed the tires, and took everything inside.
Grant and I left it behind and traveled in his truck after that.
Then Flint drove me north the morning of the Las Cruces event, before Grant rode.
" Her voice cracks on the word rode. "After Grant died, Merrick's people came looking for me.
They found the motel where Flint and I had been staying, tossed the room, left messages. I ran and kept running."
"What about Flint's copies?"
"I don't know. He stopped answering my calls weeks ago. I called once from a burner phone, and he picked up, told me he was scared, told me to stay hidden. I haven't heard from him since."
"We talked to Flint," I say. "He's alive. He's scared, but he's alive. He confirmed the FBI contact, Agent Torres in Albuquerque, and he told us to find you."
Rainey absorbs this. Her eyes close for a moment, and the relief on her face is so stark it borders on physical collapse.
"So of the three copies, the van is gone and Flint is a question mark," Colt says. "What about the third?"