Chapter 19
KENNA
Iwake up in a Las Cruces motel with Colt's arm across my waist and the knowledge that Grant is close, on the hill east of town, waiting.
Yesterday I stood beside Colt at the grave and held his hand while he talked to my brother.
I heard every word. The update on Merrick, the evidence holding, Rainey and Flint coming forward.
The part about falling for me before he knew who I was.
His voice went rough on Grant's name, rougher than usual, and I squeezed his fingers and said nothing because some grief needs a witness, not a response.
This morning I need my own time with him. There are things I need to say to my brother that belong to the two of us.
The cemetery looks different in the early light, softer than it did yesterday.
The headstones catch the sunrise, and the mountains behind them are the deep blue-purple of a bruise that's starting to heal.
Grant's stone is at the end of the row, the granite cool despite the rising sun, the carved letters sharp-edged under my fingers.
Colt waits by the truck, leaning against the tailgate with his arms crossed. The man learns. Slowly, and with the general grace of a freight train navigating a switchback, but he learns.
I kneel in front of Grant's stone and press my palm flat against the granite. "Hey, big brother."
The words come out thick. I swallow and start again.
"I know Colt told you everything yesterday. The case, the evidence, all of it. You heard him. So I'm not going to repeat the briefing." I trace the curve of the G in his name. "I'm here for the stuff he doesn't know. The stuff that's just ours."
A meadowlark calls from the fence line, bright and clean and completely indifferent to grief. I love it for that.
"I'm sorry I wasn't here. When it happened. I was in my hotel room overseas drinking bad coffee and thinking I had all the time in the world to see you again. I thought we had time." My voice catches, and I let it. Nobody here but Grant and the birds.
"You called me the week before. Asked me to come out to the circuit, said it had been too long since I'd watched you ride. I told you I'd come next month. I told you I was busy. I was always busy, and you were always patient, and now you're here and I'm kneeling in the dirt talking to stone."
The wind picks up. A mesquite tree nearby shakes, dropping a scatter of dry leaves across the grass.
"I came onto the circuit with Mom's maiden name and a press badge I fabricated and enough rage to burn the whole thing down.
I lied to everyone. I manipulated sources and broke into offices and did things that would have made you furious and proud in equal measure, because you taught me both of those things.
" I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
"The investigation is over and I still feel like I'm reaching for you. Like if I just dig deep enough, follow one more lead, pull one more thread, I'll find you at the end of it instead of a conviction."
I sit back on my heels and look at the mountains turning gold above the headstones.
"But I didn't find you. I found him." I look over my shoulder.
Colt is still at the truck, watching me with the patience of someone who understands that some conversations don't have a timeline.
"That man you kept telling me about. Your buddy Colt.
The impossible one who's too stubborn to lose and too mean to die. "
I turn back to the stone. "You were right about him. Every annoying thing you ever said. I love him, Grant."
I stay a few more minutes with my hand on the granite and the wind in my hair, and then I stand and brush the dirt from my knees and raise my voice enough to carry. "Holloway. Come say hi to my brother."
He pushes off the tailgate. His boots crunch on the gravel path, and he stops beside me, looking down at the headstone with his jaw tight and his hands hanging at his sides.
"Grant," I say to the stone, "this is the man you kept telling me about. Properly, this time. No fake name, no cover story, no lies between any of us."
I look at Colt. He looks at me.
"You were right," I say to the headstone. "He's impossible. I love him anyway."
Colt's breath catches. The sound is small, barely audible over the wind, but I hear it because I've spent months cataloging every sound this man makes.
"Kenna."
"I'm talking to my brother. Don't interrupt."
"You just said—"
"I know what I said. I'm telling Grant first because he's the one who introduced us, technically, and he'd be insufferable about it if I didn't give him credit."
He stares at me. Then he looks down at the headstone, and the corner of his mouth lifts.
"She's just like you," he says to the stone. "Worse, actually. You at least had the decency to announce things at a normal volume."
"I'm standing right here."
"I know you are." He turns to me, and his hands find my waist, pulling me toward him with the proprietary certainty that used to make me furious and now makes me feel like the ground beneath my feet is solid. "Say it again."
"Say what?"
"Don't play games, Corbin."
"I love you." The words come out simple and clear, stripped of every protective layer I've ever built. "I love you, and Grant would think it's hilarious, and I'm telling you in a cemetery because apparently our entire relationship has been defined by terrible timing and poor venue selection."
His hands tighten on my waist. "I love you too."
"I know."
"You know?"
"Colt, you drove to a storage yard to meet a man who might have been trying to kill you because you thought it would help my case.
You put yourself between me and danger without flinching.
You stayed on this circuit when walking away would have been easier and safer and smarter.
" I put my hand on his sternum, over the heartbeat that's kicking hard.
"You've been saying it for weeks. You just haven't used the word. "
"The word matters."
"The word matters," I agree. "And you just said it. In front of Grant. Who is definitely laughing."
He pulls me against him. I go willingly, fitting into the space between his arms that's become the place I think of when someone says the word home, and we stand in front of my brother's grave while the sun climbs over the mountains.
"I want to show you something," he says into my hair.
"What?"
"Home. My home. The ranch."
I pull back enough to see his face. "The ranch you don't bring anyone to?"
"That's the one."
"The sacred sanctuary where you go to be alone with your horses and your silence and your brooding?"
"I don't brood."
"You brood professionally. It should be listed on your circuit entry form under special skills."
He concedes with a look that says he's storing this for later retaliation. "I brood occasionally. The point is, I want you to see it."
"Why?"
"Because it's mine. And I want you in it."
The simplicity of the statement lands in a place I stopped guarding the moment I said the word love to Grant's headstone. Colt doesn't do speeches. He does actions and gestures and the occasional sentence that rewires your entire nervous system.
"Take me," I say.
He takes my hand and walks me back through the cemetery toward the truck, past the rows of headstones warming in the morning sun, and when I glance back one last time, Grant's stone catches the light and holds it.
We head towards the ranch, which sits in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, so far from anything resembling a city that the nearest grocery store requires its own road trip.
The land opens as we climb into the foothills, rolling grassland giving way to rocky terrain dotted with live oak and juniper, the sky vast and unbroken. Hawks circle above a ridgeline, and in the distance, mule deer pick their way along a dry creek bed.
"How much of this is yours?" I ask.
"Everything from that fence line to the ridge." He points east, where barbed wire tracks the curve of a hill. "Mostly grazing land. House is at the end of the road."
The road is a single lane of packed caliche winding through a stand of live oaks before dropping into a shallow valley. The house at the bottom is a low, stone-and-timber structure that looks like it grew out of the landscape.
A porch runs the length of the front. A stock tank sits in the pasture to the south, and Colt pulls the truck to a stop near the fence line.
The horses come up to greet him before we're out of the cab, nosing at his hands, bumping his shoulder, the easy familiarity of animals who trust the man who feeds them.
"This is Jury," he says, rubbing the blaze between a sorrel mare's eyes. "And the roan trying to eat your sleeve is Verdict."
"You named your horses Jury and Verdict."
"I also have one named Objection. She's in the back pasture being difficult, which is her default setting."
"You named your horses after legal terms."
"I named them after things I hear a lot." He pulls a piece of peppermint from his pocket and lets Verdict lip it off his palm. "Grant named Objection. Said she reminded him of me."
A beat-up Ford with a hay bale in the bed is parked near the barn, and I nod toward it. "Whose truck?"
"Emmett's. He runs the place when I'm on the road." Colt scratches Jury behind the ear. "Retired bareback rider. Took a bad wreck in Cheyenne years ago, shattered his pelvis, and the circuit was done with him. He needed a place, I needed someone I trusted with the animals. Works out."
"Where is he?"
"Checking fence line on the back acreage, if I know him. He makes himself scarce when I'm home. Says two bulls under one roof is one too many."
The tenderness in his voice as he tells his horses about Grant is different from the controlled grief at the headstone. This is quieter, more lived-in, the kind of missing that settles into daily routines and becomes part of the furniture.