10. Luca
Luca
Ican’t feel my hands. They’re clenched somewhere beneath the table. I know that because my forearms hurt. My jaw hurts too. Everything fucking hurts, and I still want to put my fist through the wall.
The urge hits so hard I have to lock my shoulders in place.
I can feel it sitting beneath my skin, hot and ugly and violent.
Every breath I take seems to feed it. Every time I look at her, it gets worse.
Because she’s sitting there. Just sitting there.
Like she didn’t just hand me a nightmare I’m going to carry for the rest of my fucking life.
I drag a hand over my mouth and immediately regret it. It doesn’t help. Nothing helps.
My chair creaks beneath me as I lean forward. I can’t sit still. I can’t think straight. My mind keeps racing in circles, looking for somewhere to put all this rage and finding nothing.
I want to break something. I want to burn something down. I want to find somebody to blame.
The worst part is that Sarah isn’t giving me anything. No tears. No shaking. No sign that she’s about to fall apart. She sits there staring at the table, completely detached from the bomb she dropped into the middle of my life.
I hate that she had to survive it. I hate that she had to carry it. I hate that I wasn’t there. I wasn’t fucking there. Eight years ago, she was seventeen years old and alone, and I was somewhere else living my own life while she was surviving hers.
The rage gets worse. My hands curl into fists again.
“Fuck.”
The word slips out quietly.
Sarah finally looks up. I hold her gaze, and for a second I forget how to breathe.
Because she’s looking at me like she’s waiting.
Waiting to see what I do with it. Waiting to see if I look at her differently now.
Waiting to see if this changes something.
It doesn’t. If anything, I think I love her so much it might actually kill me.
I push back my chair to get up, but she holds up a hand.
“I’m not finished.”
“Sarah.”
“I need to tell you the rest.”
“When it was over,” she says, her eyes fixed on the table between us, “he told me if I ever said a word to anybody, he’d kill my parents in their sleep.”
Every muscle in my body locks. That fucking coward. He wasn’t finished after what he’d done to her. He wanted to make sure she carried him home with her. Make sure she never had a safe place to run. She draws a slow breath that sounds like it hurts.
“I believed him.”
Of course she did. She was seventeen.
“I walked back to the house.” Her voice grows quieter, like she’s talking more to herself than to me.
“I remember my jeans sticking to my legs. I remember my boots leaving dirt across the kitchen floor because I didn’t even think to take them off.
” She blinks once. “I went into the bathroom, turned the shower on, and sat down with all my clothes still on.”
Shit.
“I don’t know how long I was there. I remember crying until the water turned cold.”
I can’t look away from her. Eight fucking years she’s carried this.
“When I couldn’t feel the water anymore, I stood up.” She rubs her palms together absently. “I dried off. I put on clean clothes.” Her lips part, but nothing comes out for a second. “Then I walked into my mama and daddy’s room.”
Something cold settles in my chest.
“Daddy kept a pistol in his bedside table.” She finally looks at me, and there’s nothing in her expression except exhaustion. “He’d shown me where it was years before.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Nobody was home.” Her voice is steady again. Too steady. “They were still at that ranching conference. I opened the drawer, took out the pistol, slipped on my shoes, and walked back outside.”
My hands are numb. I keep staring at hers instead because if I look anywhere else, I’m going to put my fist through the wall.
“The sun was starting to come up.” Her eyes drift somewhere over my shoulder. “Everybody else was already out in the pastures with the cattle. I knew he’d still be in the barn mucking stalls.”
Every sentence is another knife.
“I walked in, and he was kneeling in one of the stalls.” She swallows hard. “I remember hearing the shovel scrape against the floor.” Her voice drops to almost nothing. “He heard me when I got close. He started to turn around.”
Pain shoots into my temples.
“I pulled the trigger.” She pauses. “He fell before he could even finish turning around.”
I drag a hand over my face, but it doesn’t do a damn thing. The rage keeps climbing, hot enough that I can taste it.
“I remember thinking he looked smaller.” She shakes her head once. “I don’t know why I remember that.”
Because trauma remembers everything except the things that make sense.
“The adrenaline…” She lets out a shaky breath. “It was the only reason I could move him.”
I squeeze my eyes shut.
Fuck.
“I dragged him behind an old tractor Daddy hadn’t used in years. It broke down when I was little.” She pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is almost distant. “There was a tarp folded over the seat. I pulled it down and covered him.”
Silence crashes over the kitchen. I can’t think. I can’t breathe.
All I can picture is seventeen-year-old Sarah dragging the body of a thirty-year-old man across a barn by herself while the sun came up over the ranch.
I’ve killed men. I’ve buried them. I’ve done things most people couldn’t stomach, but every one of those choices belonged to me. I walked into my own darkness. Sarah had hers forced on her.
“All I could think about afterward was what my mama and daddy were going to say.” Her voice catches for the first time since she started talking. “They got home a few hours later and found me sitting at the kitchen table. I don’t think I’d moved.”
She stares down at her hands.
“I told them everything. What he did. What I’d done. Then I took them out to the barn.” She swallows hard. “Daddy looked at Randy. Then he looked at Mama. Neither of them said a word for what felt like forever.”
My chest is so tight it hurts to breathe.
“Mama just… came over and hugged me.” A tear slips down her cheek. “Daddy told me everything was going to be okay.” She lets out a shaky breath. “Mama took me back inside, sat me at the kitchen table, and stayed with me. A few hours later Daddy came home and told me it was taken care of.”
The words hit me like another punch to the gut.
“It wasn’t until years later that he finally told me what he’d done.” She meets my eyes. “He drove Randy’s body out to an old abandoned mine shaft and threw him in.”
I don’t know what’s fucking me up more. The fact that her father covered it up, or the fact that, if I’d walked into that barn and found my seventeen-year-old daughter sitting where Sarah had been sitting, I know exactly why he did it.
“I remember Daddy building a bonfire that night.” Her gaze drifts somewhere past me. “A big one. Bigger than he usually did.” She swallows. “Years later, he told me he’d gathered up everything Randy owned. His clothes. His boots. His pictures. Everything. He burned all of it.”
“The next morning, he told the rest of the ranch hands Randy had packed up and left in the middle of the night. Said he’d gotten a better offer somewhere else.
” Her voice is quiet, but steady. “Nobody questioned it. Randy didn’t have any family.
Nobody was waiting for him to come home.
As far as everyone knew, he’d just disappeared. ”
I don’t say a word. I can’t.
Because somewhere out in Montana, a father spent an entire night erasing the man who’d destroyed his daughter’s life, and I know I would do the same thing.