Chapter 21
Busy people didn’t brood.
She’d decided that somewhere around five this morning, staring at the cracks in her bedroom ceiling. So she’d left the house before she changed her mind.
Coffee from Benji’s and out working before Walter finished his first cup.
Henderson's fence dispute. Mrs. Denver’s welfare check. If Sarah kept moving, maybe her brain would eventually get tired and leave her alone.
Anything that stopped her thinking about yesterday. Her fingers gripped the steering wheel. Fence first. Hudson later.
You’d stopped being Wyatt’s little sister.
For God’s sake.
She gave herself a mental shake and turned into the Hendersons’ driveway.
She parked beside two pickups already positioned like declarations of war and climbed out.
Walter pulled in a minute later, exactly as he’d promised he would.
She didn’t need backup for a fence dispute, but nobody in the department was pretending the last few days hadn’t happened.
Daryl Henderson met her before she’d reached the gate. “I’m telling you, Sheriff, he moved the line six feet overnight.”
“Nonsense,” called his neighbor from the other side of the fence.
“See?” Daryl threw his hands up in disgust.
Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose. “One at a time.”
Daryl launched into a detailed history of survey pegs, boundary markers, and a fence post that had apparently offended three generations of Hendersons.
She listened. Or at least she looked as if she was listening.
I’d been trying not to kiss you for months.
The sentence arrived whole.
Sarah blinked.
“... and that’s why the survey’s wrong.” Daryl looked at her expectantly.
Her stupid brain was blank. “I’m sorry?”
Daryl’s heavy brows knotted. “I asked if you wanted to see the photographs.”
She blew out a breath. “Daryl, just show me where the original marker was.”
He glanced at Walter and then back to her before pointing. “I just did.”
Heat crept up her neck. “Right.”
She studied the boundary marker as though it might rescue her. It didn’t. By the time she got back in the truck, her hands weren’t entirely steady on the wheel.
I saw you cry.
That one stopped her completely, parked outside the Hendersons’ gate with the engine running and her forehead almost resting against the wheel before she caught herself and sat up straight.
The sheriff of Aurora Cove didn’t sit in her truck falling apart over something that happened when she was eighteen.
Except, she did. Right now, today, fifteen years late.
She’d spent so long believing she’d done something wrong. That she’d somehow not been enough. It had hurt, but at least it had been an explanation. She’d carried that story so long it had stopped feeling like a memory. It had become load-bearing, part of who she thought she was.
And the whole time the truth had been a boy sitting in a truck two hundred yards down the road, unable to make himself drive away from what he’d just done.
It didn’t fix it. She refused to let herself pretend it did.
He’d still left. He’d still stood alone in the dark and decided what both their lives should look like.
Knowing why didn’t give her those fifteen years back.
It didn’t change the fact that he’d made the decision for both of them.
Some stubborn part of her was still furious about that, and she wasn’t ready to let it go.
But both things were true. So she carried one truth in each hand for the rest of the morning, turning them over like smooth river stones.
One made her ache for him. The other refused to let him off the hook.
Mrs. Denver answered the door, very much alive and deeply offended that anyone had suggested otherwise. She slammed it before Sarah had finished explaining the welfare check.
Sarah gritted her teeth and headed back to her truck.
Yesterday.
It replayed differently now. The buckle caught before it struck steel.
Thirty seconds. Then fight me.
The shoelace she’d never noticed until he pointed at it.
She’d thought it was training. A man who noticed everything because missing things got people killed. She hadn’t been wrong, but she hadn’t realized she was one of the things he was noticing.
The memories rearranged themselves.
Quietly. Almost gently. As if somebody had handed her the missing page of a story she’d been reading wrong for fifteen years. None of it had been because he was flirting. It was because he’d been trying not to.
The distance he’d kept at the bar. The easy deflections at Benji’s. The hand that had lifted in the stables, then stopped before it reached her. It hadn’t been hesitation. It had been restraint. He’d been holding back since he was nineteen and had just gotten very good at it.
Which meant every careful step backward she’d spent three days resenting had probably cost him too. The corner of her mouth twitched. She tried to flatten it and failed. Honestly. He really was an idiot.
She drove back to the station, barely aware of anything but the road. Yesterday hadn’t changed the case. Cord was still missing. Time was still running out. There were still men out there willing to beat old fishermen to protect whatever they were hiding.
None of that had changed.
Hudson had. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe she’d just finally been allowed to see him properly.
He’d told her the truth. What she did with it now—that was hers.