Chapter 32
LUKE
My phone buzzes at five-oh-nine.
I'm already awake. Have been since before four, lying on Mags's couch under a blanket that smells like cinnamon, staring at the ceiling.
The text is from Bash.
Jesse's package cleared legal review this morning. Admissible. All of it. Colt has the file.
I read it twice. Then I text Jesse directly.
Bash says you delivered. I need to hear it from you.
Three minutes. Then:
Everything. Names, dates, wire transfers, photographs. I'll testify.
I put the phone down on my chest.
That's the whole answer. That's what I needed before I could get off this couch.
I lie there another minute, listening to the apartment breathe around me, thinking about a woman on a kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets and her knees up, telling me the most undefended truth she had.
A baby. Mid-April.
That night in my cabin. The blue dress and the break-in and a night I've replayed enough times that I know exactly where I was in my bed when she looked at me and said look at me and I did and I was gone.
I didn't know, lying there, that I was also starting something I can't see the end of yet. Something that scares me down to the marrow and, this is the part I'm still getting used to, makes the marrow feel worth having.
She said ours, if I want it to be.
I want it to be. I want all of it.
My hands in her hair. Her going still under my mouth. What her face looks like the first time she sees the mountains with that knowledge in her body. What she looks like at eight months in my kitchen, arguing data with her coffee going cold, refusing to admit she's not going anywhere.
I want every version of her I haven't seen yet, and I have been lying on this couch understanding, for the first time in a long time, that wanting something that much isn't a liability.
It's a direction.
I sit up.
She's at the counter when I come in, back to me, hair in a knot, wearing a grey pullover that hits her mid-thigh. Two mugs out. Not one.
She heard me move.
"You made two cups," I say.
"I made a pot." She doesn't turn around. "Don't flatter yourself."
I pull out the stool across the counter.
The September light is coming in low through the kitchen window, catching the freckles on the back of her neck, the loose strands of red at her collar.
My fingers want to be there. That pull behind my sternum that started in June and has never once let up.
I wrap my hands around the mug she sets in front of me, black, exactly right, and stay where I am.
"Thank you," I say.
She takes the stool across from me and looks at me the way she looks at data she hasn't finished reading. All the way through. Not stopping at the comfortable parts.
"You're going to tell me now," she says. Not a question. "The thing you needed one more day for."
"Yes."
She wraps both hands around her mug. Waits.
I lay it out for her. Every piece, in order. She doesn't move.
"Jesse delivered his evidence package last Monday," I say. "I needed to know it would hold before I handed it to you. Sebastian's attorney cleared it this morning. Names, dates, wire transfers, photographs, a signed statement. Admissible, all of it. Jesse's confirmed he'll testify."
She looks at her coffee. Grief, maybe, or the quiet acknowledgment of a thing that was always going to cost someone. She lets it land without moving away from it.
"He took the photograph of us."
"He did. It was the last thing they asked him for. He said it was the first moment he understood what he was actually inside."
Mags is quiet for a moment. "You went to him?"
"Last week. Stood on his porch. His kids were inside."
"Did you?—"
"No." I look at her. "Not yet. I told him I needed everything. He gave it."
She reads my face. "Known him your whole life."
"Yes," I nod. "I have."
She nods once, slow, filing it. Then her eyes come back to mine.
"There's more.”
Not a question. She knows me.
"The partial plate off Benny's camera, the truck outside your apartment the night your drive was stolen.
I took it back to the ranch and found it parked in my own equipment yard.
" I watch her. "Jesse's truck. I had my answer before Briggs ran the company name.
I sat on it because I didn't know yet what Jesse was going to do, and I wasn't going to hand you half a case. "
The silence stretches long enough that the refrigerator cycles on.
"That's what you were holding," she says.
"Yes."
"While I thought you were calculating."
"I know what it looked like. I know what it cost you to be in that room and watch me go quiet.
" I hold her gaze. "There's a war room. Has been since the night Jesse admitted what he'd done.
Colt, Ellery, Viv, Bash, Shane. They've been working the evidence chain without you in it because you weren't answering your phone and I wasn't putting you in a room with half a case.
" A beat. "I'm sorry for that. Not for building it. For building it without you."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she gets up, refills her mug, refills mine without asking, and comes back to her stool.
She sits down.
She doesn't say I forgive you. Doesn't say it makes sense or she understands. She picks up her mug and looks out the window at the September light coming in over the sharp granite peaks. The quiet that comes off her has weight to it, the weight of thinking, not closing.
I wait.
"Your father trusted him," she says finally.
"Yes," I say. "He did."
She nods. Making room.
Then she looks at me straight. "I was shot at."
The fury is there, cold and immediate, the kind that doesn't need to raise its voice.
Under it, relief so sharp it's almost grief. Someone put a rifle on her in my south pasture, and she is sitting here drinking coffee and she is fine. I hold both of those things and wait for my jaw to unclench before I speak.
"You were alone," I say.
"I called Gina."
"You were alone on the south pasture, and someone put a rifle on you and you called Gina and then nobody else." My voice is level. I am working to keep it there. "And then you opened the door for me last night and you didn't say a word."
"You were on the landing with your hat in your hands." Her chin comes up. "I wasn't going to hand you a crisis so you could fix your way back into this apartment instead of earning it."
I look at her.
She looks back.
There it is. The same architecture turned inside out. She held back the lethal thing for the same reason I held back Jesse, because she needed what came first to land without the emergency making it impossible to know what was real.
I have no ground to stand on. I did the same thing to her for a week.
I exhale through my nose.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"You're right. I'd have made it about the rifle."
Something shifts in her jaw, the faintest ease.
"You're still furious," she says.
"Going to be for a while, yes. Currently living right next door to grateful you're sitting across from me." I pick up my coffee. "We can run both."
The corner of her mouth moves. She looks at the window instead of at me, which means it almost got her.
Good.
We drink coffee.
Outside, the cottonwoods have gone completely yellow, the aspens on the ridge not far behind. Mags is watching them, hands around her mug, both feet on the rung of her stool, her red hair loose at her neck. She hasn't told me I'm forgiven. She hasn't told me I can stay.
She refilled my coffee.
I don't push.
The silence isn't empty. It's two people in the same kitchen with every ugly thing on the table between them and neither one of them standing up.
That's enough. That's more than I've had in five years.
Her phone buzzes first.
She glances at the screen and frowns.
"Emergency meeting. County and state, tonight." She looks up. "Cutter's requesting the corridor be suspended pending a full federal review."
My phone goes off six seconds later. Same message.
I set it down and look at her across the counter in the early light, the freckles, the coffee, the red hair, the full weight of everything she told me still sitting in my chest like a hand pressed flat to the floor.
"He's moving early," she says.
She's already assembling, the rapid-fire shift behind her eyes I've watched at collar sites and livestock meetings and the evening I showed up at her door with her evidence folder annotated in my handwriting. "Jesse's going to flip and he knows he's losing the timeline."
"He knows." I stand, push in my stool. "How fast can you pull together what you have?"
She gives me the look. The one that says the question is an insult. "I've had it built since August."
"Of course you have."
"How fast can you pull together what you have?"
"Already did." I pick up my hat. "Five-oh-nine this morning."
She holds my gaze for a beat. Her hands go still on the mug. Then she sets it down, and what's in her face isn't soft or easy. It's a scientist who has run the full model and is prepared to stand behind the result.
"Jesse's going to be in that room tonight," she says.
"Yes."
"With everything."
"Everything."
She nods. Stands.
She doesn't close the distance. But she looks at me across the kitchen in the yellow September light and she says, quiet and final, like it's the only conclusion the data supports:
"Then let's go to work."
I put on my hat.