Chapter 25
NORA
The lights come up behind us on Las Virgenes, red and blue, washing the inside of the G-Wagon. Marisol says a word in Spanish her grandmother wouldn't approve of.
"You were doing the limit," she says. "I watched the dash. You were doing the actual limit, which nobody does."
"I know."
"So why are we getting pulled over?"
"I don't know." But there's a cold dropping through me already, the same cold from the sauna night.
We'd been talking about the horse for forty minutes.
A seventeen-year-old Quarter Horse gelding the rescue had listed as a solid citizen with conservative trail manners, which was Marisol's criterion because she'd decided that if I'm going to keep giving Isaak progress reports, everything needs to sound completely unexciting.
Marisol had been arguing about names. I'd been thinking about the gelding's bad hocks.
I wasn't thinking about the truck that had been on our bumper since the Canyon turn.
I'm four months pregnant, not showing much yet, and I've spent six weeks being careful, taking Grigor, telling Isaak where I go.
Today Grigor had a dentist. I told Isaak I'd take Marisol to look at a rescue horse in Agoura and be back by three.
Now we are on an empty road in the dry hills with a sheriff's truck on our bumper.
I pull over. I put my hands on the wheel where they can be seen, the way my father taught me, the way you learn when you grow up around men who get stopped for the crime of their own faces.
The deputy takes his time. They always take their time.
I keep one hand on the wheel and lay the other flat against my stomach, where there's the smallest curve now, four months of a secret I've told almost no one.
I think, please, not here, not on this road, not with my whole future the size of a fist under my hand.
I make myself breathe slow. I've gentled horses that wanted to kill me by going calm when everything in me screamed run. I can do it now.
I watch him in the side mirror, a big man, unhurried, settling his hat. When he finally comes up to my window he leans down and I see the name on his chest, Hutchins. I see his face, and every animal instinct I own stands straight up.
"License and registration," he says. He's looking at me, not the documents. He runs his eyes down me like he's pricing a heifer at auction, slow, entitled, and there's a wet thing under it that makes my skin crawl. "You're a long way from the ranch, Mrs. Radulov."
He knows my name. He knows about the ranch. A traffic stop doesn't know your name before it sees your license.
"Was I speeding, officer?" I keep my voice level, the rancher's-daughter voice, the one that doesn't let the animal see you're afraid.
"Captain." He smiles. It doesn't touch his eyes.
"Captain Hutchins. And no. Taillight looked like it might be out.
Wanted to be sure you got home safe, a woman like you, all the way out here with no escort.
Your husband usually sends men." He lets that sit, his eyes moving off my face and into the car, over the back seat, the cargo space, slow, cataloguing. "He didn't today. Interesting."
Marisol shifts beside me. I put a hand on her knee, light, don't.
"The taillight's fine," I say. "We checked it this morning."
"Mind if I take a look? In the back. Make sure nothing's loose.
" He's already got a hand on the door handle, and the smile is still there.
We both know there's no taillight, we both know this isn't a traffic stop, we both know he can do whatever he wants out here on an empty road because the badge means nobody's coming.
"You need a reason to search my car," I say. "Or my permission. You don't have either."
"I have a busted taillight and concern for your safety."
"Then your concern can stay at the window," I say.
He opens the back door anyway, because the law is a thing that happens to other people out here. He leans in. I sit with my hands locked on the wheel and my heart going like a trapped bird while a man I've never met goes through my car.
He lifts the floor mats. He opens the center console. He checks under the seats, slow, thorough, looking for something specific, and it isn't drugs, it isn't a gun, because he doesn't care about the glove box. He goes straight to the cargo space.
I sit still. My hands are locked on the wheel, ten and two, the posture my father drilled into me before I was old enough to drive.
I can hear him back there. The soft drag of a mat lifting.
The brush of his hand across the carpet.
The deliberate pace of a man who knows the shape of what he's looking for.
Not the random pat-down of a traffic stop. This is specific.
The clock on the dash says we've been here five minutes.
Marisol has her hands in her lap, white-knuckled, and she's holding still the same way I held still for her once on a horse that was about to blow, neither of us moving, both of us deciding together not to be the one who spooked first. She's smarter than to say a word right now. So am I.
Then, low, almost under his breath, not meant for me: "Son of a bitch. Where's the damn box."
He's looking for the box.
The understanding goes through me cold and total. This man, this sheriff, knows about my father's box, and he is searching my car for it on a deserted road. There is only one way a county captain forty minutes out of his jurisdiction knows to look in my car for a box of my dead father's things.
Somebody told him. Somebody close enough to know what I carry from room to room, and to know my husband's driver had a dentist appointment today, which is the one window all week I'd be on that road without him.
"Pregnant," Hutchins says, conversational, from the back seat, and my whole body goes to ice.
He's looking at the prenatal vitamins that rolled out from under the seat when he lifted the mat, the big horse-pill bottle from Dr. Anand.
"Congratulations. That's a delicate condition.
You'll want to be real careful these next months. Avoid stress. Bad roads."
He straightens up, holding the bottle, turning it in his fingers, and looks at me in the rearview with a look that is almost kind. The almost-kindness of it's what turns my stomach to water, worse than a threat said plain. "Lot of things can go wrong for a woman alone."
"Put it back," I say, and my voice cracks. I hate that it cracks, and I can't stop it.
He puts it back. Gently. He's made his point. He didn't find the box, because the box isn't in my car, the box is in a tack room in Calabasas. But he found something better, he found the thing I'm most afraid of losing, and he held it in his hand, turned it in the light so I'd know he could.
"You have a good day, Mrs. Radulov." He shuts the back door.
"Drive safe. Tell your husband Wade Hutchins says hello.
Tell him I said it's a shame, a man with all that reach, and he still can't be everywhere at once.
" He taps the roof of the car twice, like patting an animal, and he walks back to his truck, unhurried.
He sits there with his lights off, watching us until I get the car in gear and pull away on legs that don't feel like mine.
I put us back on the road. Both hands on the wheel, eyes forward, the way I ride a horse that's decided it's done. My pulse is going in my throat. I don't look in the rearview. If I look and he's still back there with his lights off, watching, I don't know what I'll do. So I don't look.
I pass a turnout. There's a car sitting in it, pulled nose-out toward the road, the hood shimmering in the heat. Silver, forgettable. My eyes go left to the driver's window.
A man. Face angled away, one hand low on the wheel. I get the jaw, the set of the shoulder. Then I'm past it.
Was that Brandon?
I keep driving. My hands stay where they are.
The question sits in my chest, hot and wrong, nothing like the cold Hutchins left me with.
I was already rattled, my pulse already going before I saw anything.
A man parked on a back road is just a man.
Two seconds through glass, face turned away.
I can't be sure. I tell myself I can't be sure. I don't stop.
Then a bend, then a long flat where the hills open up on both sides. I drive, counting the white dashes on the center line until my hands stop shaking. Marisol has her hands in her lap. She didn't look left.
Marisol doesn't say anything for a mile. Then, quiet, "That wasn't a traffic stop."
"No."
She puts both hands flat on her legs. "Give me a second."
"Take all you need."
"I'm not." She exhales through her nose. "He knew your name before you handed him the license."
"Yes."
"He said the word pregnant."
"Yes."
"He went straight for the cargo space." She turns to look at me. "Nora."
"I know." I keep my eyes on the road. "I know."
"He knew you were pregnant. He went for the vitamins like he knew they'd be there." She's pale, her hands gripped together in her lap. "Nora, he knew about a box. I heard you. What box? What was he looking for?"
"I don't know." It's half a lie. I don't know what's in the box.
But I know it's the box he wants. The sealed crate from my father's tack room that I've carried with me everywhere and never opened, that Tessa kept circling back to with her too-casual questions, that somebody's been hunting since before I understood I was being hunted at all.
"My dad's old things. There's nothing in it but tack, trophies, and a notebook.
There's nothing in there worth doing this over. "
"Somebody thinks there is." Marisol turns in her seat to look at me, the fear gone to fury in her face the way it always goes with her.
"How did he know Grigor was off today?" She's already working it backward, I can hear it.
"You take Grigor everywhere. Six weeks, you've had a shadow on you, and the one day you don't, a cop's waiting on Las Virgenes like he had your schedule printed out. "
"I've been asking myself that since he tapped the roof."
"So ask it out loud, because I'll say it if you won't." She's gripping the door handle. "Who knew Grigor had a dentist? Who knew you were driving me to Agoura today?"
I make myself answer, because she's right, and because saying it to Marisol is easier than saying it to myself.
"Isaak. Grigor. You. The household, maybe, if they overheard.
" I swallow. "And I told Tessa. She called this morning.
She asked what I was up to, and I told her, the whole day, Grigor's tooth, the horse in Agoura, all of it.
I tell Tessa everything. I've told Tessa everything since we were twelve. "
Marisol doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to.
We've both been circling Tessa for weeks, the questions about the trophies, the warmth that comes a half-beat late.
Neither of us has wanted to be the one to say the word out loud, because the word is betrayal and the person it belongs to has been Nora's best friend for eighteen years.
"It's not proof," I say, too fast. "Half the valley knew I was going to Agoura. It could be anybody. It could be the household."
"It could be," Marisol says, in the voice of a woman who doesn't believe it could be, and she puts her hand over mine on the gearshift. We drive the rest of the way not saying the thing we're both thinking.
"Then why does a cop forty minutes out of his county want it?" Marisol says, after a while. Breaking the surface of the silence.
"I don't know," I say. "That's what scares me."
She doesn't answer. Neither do I. I drive.
The dry hills go by. I do the thing I am very good at and very tired of.
I hold a cold fact in my chest and refuse to fall apart around it.
Somebody fed that man my movements. Somebody who knew Grigor was out today.
The list of people who knew that is short, and it has my oldest friend's name on it.
I am not ready to look at that, so I don't, the same way I haven't looked at the half-late warmth in her voice for weeks.
I get us back to the estate. I hug Marisol too long in the motor court and tell her to text me when she's home, lock her doors.
She holds onto me a second, says be careful in a voice that means it, and she drives off.
I stand in the gravel. I know before I'm through the gate. I'm not going to tell him.
I know exactly what happens if I tell him.
I tell him a sheriff stopped his pregnant wife on an empty road, searched her car, held her prenatal vitamins in his hand, made a threat about things going wrong.
Isaak goes to find Wade Hutchins. Isaak isn't careful when it comes to me, he has told me so, he has built a whole life out of throwing caution away the second the one thing he can't replace is at risk.
Now there are two of those things, and a sheriff is exactly the kind of man you can't make disappear without the whole sky falling.
If I tell him, he does something that ends him.
So I won't. I'll add it to the pile I'm already hauling alone, the box, the baby, the love I still haven't said out loud, and now this, a sheriff's almost-kind face in a rearview promising me harm. I'll handle it myself until I figure out how. I've been handling things myself my whole life.
I go inside, I wash my face, and I find my husband in his study. He looks up, and his eyes go over me once, fast, the way they always do, catching that something's moved in me before I've said a word.
"How was Agoura?" he says. "The horse any good?"
"Sweet old gelding, bad hocks. Marisol's in love.
" I cross the room and I kiss him. I let him pull me into his lap, I press my face into his neck so he can't read my eyes, and I lie to the one person I swore I'd never lie to, because I love him too much to hand him the thing that would get him killed.
He's warm, and the smell of him is the thing that's going to make this lie harder to hold.
"Nothing exciting. Long drive. I missed you. "
His hand finds the back of my head. "You okay?"
"Fine," I say into his neck. "Just tired."
He holds me. His hand moves on my back. And I feel him decide to believe me, or decide to let me have it, the mercy that is going to cost us both.
I hold onto him in the lamplight with a sheriff's voice in my head saying he can't be everywhere at once, and for the first time I understand that the danger isn't coming.
It's here. It found the road. And I just sent the one man who could stop it to bed without a word, to keep him alive, which might be the thing that gets us all killed.