Chapter Eighteen #3
“Girls are harder,” Caleb said. His hands were folded in his lap.
His profile was calm in the passenger seat light, and the contradiction of it—Caleb Pruitt, discussing baby names while hurtling down a county road that had personally victimized our axle three times, completely serene—was something I filed under its own category: My Brother, Actually Fearless.
“Eleanor is pretty,” I said.
“Eleanor is the woman who tried to have Jackson killed.”
“Right. Not Eleanor.”
“Maybe something from the ranch. Black Butte has a nice ring to it for a middle name.”
“Black Butte Pruitt-Callahan. That child will need therapy by age six.”
“Pruitt-Callahan is already a lot to carry. The child will be resilient by necessity.”
I laughed. The sound bounced off the windshield and landed in the cab between us, warm and easy, and for approximately two minutes and seventeen seconds, the morning was perfect. The kind of perfect that lives in retrospect, the kind you don’t know you’re having until it’s already gone.
Then I checked the rearview mirror.
Dark late-model truck. No ranch plates. Two vehicles back, holding steady.
I’d seen it on the main road leaving the clinic.
Had noticed it idling at the intersection when we pulled out, and filed it under the category of things that were probably nothing and definitely worth noting, because Mitch Pruitt had spent twenty-four years in foster care learning that probably nothing was the cousin of absolutely something, and the family resemblance was strong.
I saw it again at the first turn. Same distance. Same pace. Not speeding up, not falling back, just there, patient, the kind of patience that belonged to men who had time and intent and neither of those things was good for the people in front of them.
My jaw tightened. I took the long way around—the unnecessary loop past Miller’s feed store, the one that added seven minutes to the drive and served no purpose except to confirm what I already knew.
It followed.
My hands settled on the wheel. Ten and two, deliberate, the particular stillness of a man who has decided not to let his hands shake because his hands shaking would mean something he was not prepared to admit.
The road curved ahead. Gravel shoulders, drop-off to the east where the ridge fell away into pine and rock, and the dark truck held its distance behind us like it had all day.
Caleb was mid-sentence about middle names. Something about family tradition and the fact that we didn’t have one, so we could invent one, and wouldn’t that be nice, to invent a tradition, to build something that hadn’t existed before—He stopped talking, looked at my face, then at the mirror.
Then he went quiet in the specific way he went quiet when something was wrong and he was deciding not to panic, which was Caleb’s version of courage and also the thing that made my chest hurt every time I witnessed it.
“Tighten your seatbelt,” I said. Calm. Level. The voice I used when the thing happening was real and the person listening needed to hear certainty more than they needed to hear fear.
Caleb pulled his seatbelt tighter.
“Get your phone out,” I said. “Call it in to the ranch. Sterling’s frequency. Use the word moving. Just say it into the phone. He’ll come.”
“Moving,” Caleb said. His voice was steady.
His hands were steady. Twenty-four years of being Mitch Pruitt’s brother had built a specific kind of calm into his nervous system, the kind that activated when everything else was falling apart, and I watched it activate in real time, reliable as gravity.
“He’s going to be so angry,” Caleb said.
“He’s going to be angry and he’s going to come. Those things can both be true at once.”
Caleb got the phone out. Sterling’s phone, the one I’d forgotten to give back, the one that lived in my pocket and now lived in Caleb’s hand, and the particular irony of it—Sterling’s phone being used to call him while his unborn children were in a truck being followed by men Sterling would very much like to meet—was not lost on me, but irony was a luxury that could wait.
Caleb got the call out. Barely. Three words into the frequency—“This is moving”—and the dark truck accelerated.
The impact hit us from behind with the force of something that had been waiting for the moment. Metal screamed. The truck lurched forward. Both of us snapped against our seatbelts, shoulder straps biting.
Caleb made a small involuntary sound—caught breath, sharp, scared—that I was going to hear in my sleep for a very long time, and the sound of it did something to my chest that translated directly to my hands on the wheel, which locked, which held, which kept us on the road through pure refusal.
Second impact. Harder. The dark truck’s grille filled the rearview, pushing, shoving us toward the shoulder where the gravel gave way to air and the eastern ridge dropped two hundred feet into lodge pole pine and nobody would find the wreckage for days.
I steered into it. Both hands locked on the wheel, tires biting gravel, fighting for purchase on a surface that had never been designed for this.
The truck shuddered. The engine roared. Caleb’s hand found the dashboard, bracing, and I kept us on the road through the third impact by the simple arithmetic of want.
I was not going off that road. Not with Caleb in the passenger seat. Not with two heartbeats that nobody else knew about yet. Not today. Not ever. The equation was simple and the solution was refusal, and I had built a life on refusing things that thought they were inevitable.
“Mitch.”
Just my name. Low. Scared. The kind of scared that cost Caleb something to admit, because Caleb Pruitt did not admit to fear until fear was winning, and hearing it in his voice—raw, unfiltered, just my name—did something to my chest that translated directly to my foot on the gas, which pressed, which held, which kept us moving.
“Help is coming,” I said. Flat. Certain.
The voice of a man who had decided that the truth was better than comfort, even when the truth was that we were being run off a road by a man who probably worked for the traitor Sterling was hunting, and the traitor was connected to the cut fence and the contractors and the entire architecture of threat that had been building at the ranch for weeks, and none of that mattered half as much as the fact that Sterling had heard that call.
“Sterling is already in the truck,” I said. “You know he is.”
Caleb’s breath caught. “He’s going to be so angry at us.”
“He’s going to be angry and then he’s going to be something else and then we’re going to tell him about the nursery.”
Caleb laughed. Short. Genuine. Slightly hysterical, the kind of laugh that lived in the space between terror and relief, and the sound of it—Caleb laughing while being chased off a cliff—was something I filed under its own category: My Brother, Actually Unhinged, And I Love Him Completely.
I kept driving, did not look at Caleb’s face, and did not check the rearview more than absolutely necessary.
I kept my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road and my foot on the gas, and the eastern ridge came into view ahead of us, gray and relentless, and the drop-off was visible through the passenger window now, close, too close, pine tops visible below the gravel edge where the world fell away.
The dark truck’s engine roared behind us. Louder. Closer. The fourth impact was coming—I could feel it in the vibration through the wheel, in the particular quality of the engine noise building behind us—and my hands locked on the wheel and the road stretched ahead.
And somewhere in the calculus of this morning, two very small heartbeats were counting seconds inside my brother’s body, and I was not losing anything today. Not the truck. Not the road. Not the future stretched out ahead of us in a shade of yellow that didn’t apologize.
The impact came. Metal screamed. The world lurched.
I held the wheel.