36. Grant
THIRTY-SIX
GRANT
The next forty-eight hours are the most controlled chaos I've experienced since prison.
Nova tells me this later in the barn, during evening rounds.
"Granddad never cries," she says. Wondering. "He cried."
"Yeah," I say.
She hands me a curry comb. "You okay?"
"Working on it."
She looks at me with those direct eyes. "The man today. Blake."
"Yes."
I look at her.
"I figured it out," she says. "When he said things. The way he looked at you." She pauses. "He wanted you to know he wasn't going to hurt you. Through me. He made me his—" she finds the word, "—his messenger."
"He's been—" I stop. "He's not a good man. He's made choices that—hurt people." I choose careful. "Including Morgan."
"But he didn't want to hurt you," she says.
"That's not the same as being good. People can love someone and still be destructive. Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Nova is quiet for a moment.
"Like addiction," she says.
I look at her.
"You love yourself," she says carefully, working it out. "But the addiction is, it hurts you. And it's both."
"Yeah," I say. “That’s, yeah."
She absorbs this. Goes back to the brushing.
"Are you sad about him?" she asks.
Am I.
"Yeah," I say. "A little. In a complicated way." I look at the horse under my hands. "I always thought, if I found out he was real, he'd be someone worth finding. That's a thing you do. When you grow up without a friend. You build a picture."
"And the picture was wrong."
"The picture was incomplete." I pause. "He's a person who made bad choices with real damage. He's also, apparently someone who didn't want to directly harm me. In his own entirely insufficient way." I breathe. "I don't know what to do with that yet."
"You don't have to do anything with it yet," Nova says. Completely matter-of-fact. "You can just not know. For a while."
I look at her.
"My therapist says that," she says. "Not everything resolves immediately. Some things you just carry until you know what to put them down for."
"Your therapist is right."
"I know." She looks at me. "I'm going to start going again. She's in Whitmore County but that's okay. Mom said she'll drive me."
"That's good, Nova."
"You should come too." She says it very casually. "Not to my appointments, obviously. But, you should keep going. To yours."
"I have been."
"Good." She passes me the brush. "Here. You do the left side."
I take the brush.
We work the horse in the quiet barn, and outside the county night is dark and the investigation is underway and the case is building and everything is moving toward something real.
And I am here.
At this table. With these people. In this place.
For the first time in longer than I can say, that feels like enough.
A week after Harker Road, I pack a bag.
Not everything. Just a bag. The practical items. Toiletries, some clothes, the book on the nightstand. I stand in my apartment at the end of the workday and look at the small, quietly assembled life I've made in these four rooms, and I think about what Dave said.
The variable that gets subtracted.
Every time things get complicated.
I've been doing that my whole life. Adding myself to situations and then removing myself before the consequences of staying could be tested.
Before the story could get to the part where someone leaves, I leave.
It's a particular kind of self-protection that looks like sacrifice and functions as fear.
I pick up the bag.
I drive to the ranch.
Presley is on the porch when I pull in, which has become his evening habit, sitting with the county dark coming in and the horses settled and the particular satisfaction of a man who knows his property and is making peace with needing help with it. He looks at the bag in my hand.
"Room's ready," he says. "Second one on the right, upstairs."
I look at him. "We didn't?—"
"Jessika mentioned you might need somewhere while your arm heals." He's looking at the tree line, not at me. "The apartment stairs are a problem with a cast."
This is not true. The apartment stairs are fine.
"Presley," I say.
"Second on the right," he says. And picks up his coffee.
I go inside.
The second room on the right is clean and prepared, which means someone, Jessika, probably, has been planning this for longer than today. There's a lamp on the nightstand and the window looks out over the north pasture where Callie is moving in the last of the light.
I set the bag down.
Then I go back downstairs and find Nova in the kitchen making what appears to be a deliberate disaster of some baked good project that has flour on three surfaces and the expression of someone who is absolutely not nervous about whatever's happening.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey."
"There's coffee," she says. "It's fresh. I made it."
"I can see that."
"I also made these." She indicates a plate of something that is clearly cookies, some of which have survived the process more successfully than others. "They're oatmeal raisin. Don't tell me if you hate raisins, I don't want to know."
I pick one up. Take a bite.
It's actually good.
"You're a good baker," I say.
She looks startled. Then pleased. Then covers it. "I know. I've been doing it since I was seven."
"Where's your mom?"
"Barn." She goes back to the disaster on the counter. "She's been out there for an hour. She says she's checking on the horses. She's actually—" Nova pauses, choosing words, "—she's like me. When she's thinking hard about something, she goes to the horses."
I look toward the barn through the kitchen window.
"Go," Nova says. Still not looking at me. "The cookies will be fine without you."
I go to the barn.
Jessika is in Sullivan's stall, which makes sense because Sullivan has been the most affected by the fire and the subsequent disruption and requires the most patient work.
She's brushing her down with long, even strokes, not rushing, the particular patience of someone who knows you can't hurry an animal back to trust.
She looks up when she hears me come in.
Something in her face opens.
"You're here," she says.
"I'm here."
She sets the brush on the stall rail. Comes out to where I'm standing in the barn aisle.
"You're staying," she says.
"Yeah. I'm staying."
She looks at me for a long moment.
Then she steps forward and puts her arms around me, careful of the cast arm, intuitive, and I hold her with the good arm, and she puts her face against my neck, and we stand in the barn in the evening light with the horses around us and the county dark coming in outside.
"I was afraid you wouldn't," she says against my collar. "I was afraid you'd?—"
"I know," I say. "I'm done subtracting myself."
"Good." She pulls back slightly. Looks at me. "Because if you'd tried to leave I was going to make you stay.”
"Jessika—"
"Have Nova ambush you in the kitchen with emotional warfare and oatmeal raisin cookies."
I almost laugh.
"She's already working on me," I say.
"I know. I gave her the recipe."
I look at this woman, this complicated, sharp, warm, exhausted, brilliant woman who came home to save something and ended up saving several things she wasn't expecting.
"I love you," I say.
I say it the way I do most things, flat, certain, without a lot of preparation. Because it's true and it's been true for a while and I'm tired of being careful about things that are actually just simple.
She goes very still.
Then: "Grant."
"You don't have to.”
"I love you," she says. Very direct. The attorney's eye for evidence meeting the simple fact of it. "I have been, for some time, actually. I just didn't want to say it until I was sure you were going to stay."
"I'm staying," I say.
"Okay." She almost smiles. "Then I love you."
We stand in the barn.
Outside, the county does what it does, dark roads and tree lines and the particular close darkness of rural places that has no comparison anywhere. Inside, the horses shift and settle.
"Hey," says a voice from the barn door.
Nova is in the doorway with a cookie in each hand and her headphones around her neck, and her expression is doing something I haven't seen it do before, something unguarded and young and soft.
"Those are for later," Jessika says.
"I'm rationing them," Nova says. She comes into the barn and looks at Grant. Looks at her mother. Assesses everything with her thirteen-year-old radar. "You're staying."
"Yeah," I say.
"Good." She holds out a cookie. "You should have had a say in the oatmeal raisin choice but it was too late to ask you. If you hate raisins, it's your fault for not being here earlier."
I take the cookie.
"I don't hate raisins," I say.
"Good." She starts walking back toward the barn door. Then stops. "Grant."
I look at her.
"You're the first person who stayed when things got hard," she says. Very quiet. Very certain. "I want you to know I noticed that."
Then she's gone, back toward the house, and Jessika and I are standing in the barn with the particular weight of something real having been said, and I am?—
I am here.
Here, in this place, with these people, in this particular life that has been assembled from everything that went wrong and the choice, made again and again and again, to keep going.
"Come inside," Jessika says. Takes my good hand.
I go inside.