CHAPTER EIGHT
MAEVE
The collapse takes about a week, but I watch almost none of it, which surprises me more than anyone.
Wade is suspended within days, pending the outside review Tessa demanded on a dark trailhead.
The campaign doesn’t so much end as evaporate, donors releasing statements about family values, the state party discovering urgent commitments elsewhere, neighboring sheriffs describing themselves as shocked, several of them the same men who clapped him onto the podium at the summit.
The local station runs the badge clip on a loop for days, then moves on to a weather event. Snake Canyon does what Snake Canyon does. It absorbs the scandal, talks it to death at the feed store, and starts wondering who’ll run in the special election.
At the station, the strangest part is how ordinary everything is. The calls keep coming. A lost hiker on the north rim, a rollover on the county road, the usual quiet disasters of a canyon county, and my teams run them as they always have, except now nobody lowers their voice when I walk in.
Carlos starts answering the station phone with “Valentine’s outfit” again, which he stopped doing the week the rumors started, and I pretend not to notice when Ramona leaves a coffee on my desk every morning without saying a word about it.
Harper fares no better, and she figures out why faster than Wade does.
The clip of her manufacturing her own injuries in that parking lot is beyond the reach of even her family’s lawyers, because it played in front of a pavilion full of cameras and a television feed.
There is no version of events the Sloans can buy back.
I hear, thirdhand, that she’s demanding Wade publicly defend her, that he stand up and confirm her account of the trailhead, of everything. Wade, who no longer has a department, a campaign, or a podium, declines. Whatever they had is eating itself now, and I find I don’t need a seat for it.
The last I hear, and I do mean the last, because I stop listening after this, is that Harper is telling anyone who’ll take the call that Wade put her up to everything, and Wade is telling his one remaining friend in the county that she blackmailed him, and the Sloans are quietly arranging for their daughter to spend some time at a property far from Snake Canyon.
Two people who needed an audience to exist, left alone with only each other. I spent seven months as raw material for their story. Let them be the material for once.
Wade comes to me on a Thursday, to the little rental house Meredith found me across the canyon, and he comes in stages.
First, apology. He stands on my porch in plain clothes, no uniform, and it’s astonishing how much smaller the man is without it, and says he knows he failed me, that it got away from him, that he never stopped loving me.
When that doesn’t open the door, blame: Harper pursued him, Harper manipulated him, you don’t know what she was like, she threatened to blow everything up if he ended it.
And when that doesn’t work either, the mask drops entirely.
“You destroyed everything.” He’s not on the porch now. He’s got a hand flat on the door I’m holding at the chain. “Eighteen years, and you burned my whole career down in front of cameras because you couldn’t handle-”
“Harper never made you cuff me.” I say it quietly, and he stops.
“She didn’t put your hands on those handcuffs, Wade.
She didn’t make you sit across from me in that room and ask if I’d blacked out when you already knew the answer.
She didn’t make you threaten me with my own arrest, or try to cuff me again in front of the whole county.
She suggested. You decided. Every single time, you decided. ”
“I loved you.” He says it like a verdict. “Everything I did, I loved you.”
“No.” It’s not even hard to say, that’s the strange thing, the grief is just gone out of it, spent.
“You loved being believed. I was part of the uniform. The wife who vouched for you. You didn’t love me; you loved what I told people about you.
” I start closing the door. “Meredith has the divorce papers. Sign them.”
“Or what?” It comes out of him ugly and fast. “What are you going to do, Maeve? Call the cops?”
The irony of that question hangs in the doorway between us, and for once he hears it himself, because his face changes. He built an entire career out of being the call people make. Now the call goes to somebody else.
Meredith files the paperwork within the week, clean and quick, and Wade’s attorney stops returning creative ideas about reconciliation when the summit footage makes the second round of news.
The marriage that took eighteen years to build takes a handful of signatures to start dismantling.
There’s a lesson in that I choose not to look at too closely.
He comes back eleven nights later, after dark, after drinking, by the sound of him.
I know it’s him before he speaks. I lie awake most nights now anyway, not with fear exactly, but with the old habit of listening, and I hear the truck come up the gravel too fast and stop crooked, and a door slam, and boots that stagger once on the path.
The porch light is off. I leave it off. There’s a part of my brain, trained by eighteen years, that wants to open the door before he breaks something, that wants to manage him, smooth it over, keep the peace. I stand in the dark hallway and let that part of me shout itself hoarse, and I don’t move.
“Maeve. Maeve, open the door. We can fix this, we can still fix this, I’ll tell them anything you want, I’ll recant the whole-”
“Go home, Wade.”
“You’re my wife.” The door frame shudders. He’s hitting it now, shoulder into it, the wood flexing in a way that makes my hands go cold. “You don’t get to just erase eighteen years, open the door, OPEN THE-”
I don’t freeze, and I don’t hide, and I don’t call Luke.
I do exactly what I spent weeks quietly preparing to do.
I hit every exterior light at once, the whole front of the little house flooding white, and the cameras I had installed the day I moved in start recording the former sheriff of Snake Canyon trying to force his way into his wife’s home.
Then I call the sheriff’s department, and my voice on the recording is, I will say, admirably level.
He stops when the lights hit him. That’s the thing about Wade. Every act he’s ever committed required the dark, or a locked room, or a controlled version. The lights go on and he just stands there in the glare with his fist still raised, a man caught mid-frame in his own life.
The patrol unit that arrives is driven by a deputy I’ve known since he was a trainee, a quiet kid named Okafor who once rode along on a river rescue and threw up in my truck. He gets out, looks at the cameras, looks at Wade.
“Sir. Step away from the door.”
“Do you know who you’re talking to?” It’s reflex.
“Yes, sir. Step away from the door, please.”
And Wade does. He obeys a deputy, on my doorstep, in the floodlights, while I watch from the doorway with the chain still on.
Whatever happens to him after tonight isn’t mine to manage and I don’t ask.
Okafor handles it with a calmness Wade never once showed me, and the taillights go down the canyon road, and the house is quiet again.
I turn off the lights, check the locks, and stand in my dark kitchen for a while, waiting for the shaking to start.
It doesn’t come.
I make tea and drink half of it at the counter, and I think about the woman who ran out of a sheriff’s station not two months ago with her whole life on fire behind her.
She couldn’t have stood in a dark hallway and listened to Wade Valentine break himself against her door without opening it.
She’d have managed him. Smoothed it over.
Kept the peace at her own expense, as she always did.
She’s gone. I’m what’s left, and I’m starting to like the company.
Somewhere across town, Wade and Harper are learning what they’re each like without anyone left to blame it on.
I hope it’s everything they deserve, and I hope I never have to watch another minute of it.
I have a search and rescue organization to run, a divorce to finish, and a life that starts, finally, in the morning.