Chapter 27 Carson
TWENTY-SEVEN
CARSON
I don’t think I’ve ever been so nervous in my life as I go into Shawn’s office. I take the steps two at a time, and my heart is pounding a beat within my chest. It’s been hard being away from her, even though it’s only been about an hour and a half.
I burst through the door, ready to protect her if need be, but it’s just her sitting there. After going over and giving her a big kiss, and then pulling up a chair beside her desk, I decide I’m going to stay, if that’s what she wants.
“Do you want to go home?” I ask quickly. “Or do you want to stay?”
“I want to stay and see this through. Things will move quickly. If Shawn has already told the state attorney’s office, they may arrest the sheriff today.”
“They’d move that quickly?” This is surprising to me because nothing I’ve ever needed done has been done before noon.
“Yeah, considering he’s a sheriff. They won’t want him in power for too long after he finds out that we’re on to him.”
The two of us are quiet as we look at one another. It’s obvious that she’s nervous, and I’m not sure how to help that nervousness. “What can I do to help?”
“Tell me about your parents, Carson. What do you remember about them?”
The request catches me off guard, but she’s shared so much with me, it’d be unfair for me to share with her.
“I had just turned eighteen when they died. They died three weeks after my birthday, and I remember thinking that I had wished I’d paid more attention to them at my party.
” I say the words so softly I’m not sure if she can even hear me.
“What happened at your party?”
“I had a date,” I admit, and the words are heavy.
I’ve been carrying for a long time. “Girl from my class. I’d been trying to get her attention for most of senior year, and she’d finally said yes to something.
My party was a ranch party, nothing fancy, just everyone out in the yard, my mom’s cooking.
We built a bonfire.” I pause, turning my hat over in my hands the way I always do when I don’t know what else to do with them.
“I rushed through all of it. The cake, the toasts my brothers tried to give, my dad trying to pull me aside for one of his talks.” My jaw tightens at the memory of that moment.
“I brushed him off because I wanted to get cleaned up before she got there.”
Lennon is watching me with those eyes that see everything, and she doesn’t say a word. She just lets me talk.
“Three weeks later, they were gone. It was a car accident on the highway coming back from Rapid City. And I’ve thought about that birthday probably a thousand times since then. My dad, standing there wanting five minutes with me, and I couldn’t give it to him.”
“Carson.” Her voice is soft.
“I know. I know I was eighteen, and I was being an eighteen-year-old kid. Devlin has told me that a hundred times.” I set my hat down on the edge of her desk. “But knowing something and feeling something are two different things.”
She reaches over and puts her hand on my forearm, and the warmth of it cuts through the chill that always comes with that particular memory. I look down at her hand and then back up at her face, and the tightness in my chest loosens the way it only ever does around her.
“Tell me something good about them,” she says quietly. “Not the end. Tell me who they were.”
And that’s the thing about Lennon Walsh. She always asks the right questions.
I lean back in the chair, stretching my legs out, and let myself go back to the parts I’ve spent years protecting, keeping them wrapped up tight so they wouldn’t get worn down from too much handling.
“My dad was never late for dinner.” I say it slowly, like I’m pulling it up from somewhere deep.
“I mean, never. It didn’t matter what was happening on the ranch, what needed doing, what disaster had come up.
Five-thirty, he was walking through that door.
Every single night. He’d come in and go straight to my mom, kiss her on the cheek, ask her what he could do to help.
” I shake my head, smiling ruefully. “She never needed help. She had everything handled three steps before he got there. But he asked every night anyway.”
“That’s all any woman wants,” Lennon says under her breath.
“That’s what you want?” I ask, needing to know if it’s that simple.
“Yeah, a man who asks if I need help, and who wants to be at home? My dad never wanted that, and I told myself I would have it. I would have a man who wanted to be with me.”
“My dad was that type of man. He used to tell us that the ranch would still be there after dinner. That the work would wait, but the people at the table wouldn’t, and he meant it.
” I can see him so clearly when I let myself look.
Big hands, sun-weathered neck, the particular way he’d pull out my mother’s chair before he sat down in his own.
“There were six of us kids at that table every night, if not more, depending on how many friends we had over. Loud as hell. And he sat at the head of it like it was the best place in the world to be.”
Lennon makes a small sound, and when I glance over at her, she’s looking at her hands in her lap.
“My mom was…” I trail off, trying to find the words that are big enough and can’t.
“She walked us out. Every time. Didn’t matter if you were heading to school, or to work, or just into town for an hour.
She’d come out onto the porch and watch until she couldn’t see your taillights anymore.
I used to think it was just something she did.
” I can feel the back of my throat getting tight in the way I hate.
“Now I think she just wanted to hold on to every leaving because she knew one day the leaving would be longer.”
“She sounds like she loved well,” Lennon says.
“She did. They both did. It wasn’t a perfect marriage—they had their arguments, their rough patches.
I’m old enough now to know that, to fill in some of the blanks I was too young to see clearly.
But even when things were hard between them, you never once questioned whether they were in it for the rest of their lives.
” I turn my head to look at her. “My dad used to look at my mom from across a room like she’d just walked in for the first time.
Even after twenty years of marriage and kids and all the hard years that come with running a working ranch, he still looked at her like that. ”
Lennon is quiet for a long moment.
“That’s what I’ve always wanted,” she finally says, so softly I feel it more than hear it. Her eyes stay on her hands. “Not the big gestures. Not someone who’s perfect or who has it all figured out. Just someone who still looks at me like that. Like I’m worth looking at.”
“Len.” I reach over and tip her chin up with two fingers. Her eyes are bright, and she blinks hard, fighting whatever’s trying to come up. “You are worth looking at. In every damn room you walk into.”
The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile, but something trying to be one.
“Your parents sound like they were really something,” she says.
“They were. And the older I get, the more I understand how rare that was, what they had. I spent a long time thinking it meant I had an impossible standard to live up to.” I hold her gaze. “Now I’m starting to think it just means I know what it looks like when I find it.”
She holds my eyes for a beat, and emotions pass between us that don’t need words. It’s the kind of quiet that’s between two people who’ve said the important things and don’t need to fill the space around them.
Then the door to the office opens.
We both turn, and Shawn steps in. But he’s not alone.
There’s a woman behind him, maybe late twenties to early thirties, with dark circles under her eyes and the kind of face that tells you she’s been carrying around a lot of pain for a long time.
She’s got one hand on the shoulder of a boy beside her, maybe eight or nine years old, dark-haired, solemn in the way that kids get solemn when they’ve seen way more shit than they should have at their age.
He’s pressed close against her side, the way kids do when a room is unfamiliar and the adults in it are strangers.
Shawn closes the door behind them. His expression is careful and controlled.
“Carson, Lennon,” he says, “I want you to meet someone.” He gestures to the woman. “This is Claire Reagan.” He lets that land for a breath before he adds, “And this is Tommy.”
The name hits me like a fist to the sternum.
Reagan.
This is the wife and son that Shawn and Lennon have been protecting, and it dawns on me. If they’re here, then it’s because it’s safe for them to be. He must’ve already been arrested.
The woman looks over at Lennon. “I just wanted to say thank you. You gave us our lives back.”
Pride like I’ve never felt before rushes through my body. The woman I love did this, and I’m going to make sure she knows just how special she is.
And I think that if we make it through the other side of this, I am going to spend the rest of my life making sure Lennon Walsh knows what it feels like to be someone worth looking at.
Every single day.