Chapter 69
Chapter
Sixty-Nine
An hour later, the place had transformed, Wren mused.
Deputies moved in and out of the house. An ambulance sat crooked in the drive with its back doors open.
Cody had arrived somewhere in the middle of it all.
He sat on the grass with Mason pulled against his chest, one hand cradling the back of their son’s head.
Wren stopped for a second and watched them. Mason was safe. He would be okay. That was what mattered. The rest of this mess could be sorted out later.
Her son was pale and shaken, but he was talking. When Cody loosened his grip long enough for a paramedic to check him over, Mason complained that the blood pressure cuff squeezed too hard.
Such a normal complaint.
Wren nearly cried from relief. She desperately wanted normal right now.
Her gaze wandered across the yard to Nash.
He stood several feet from the ambulance, one hand braced against his hip. Someone had cleaned the blood from his face, but a cut remained near his mouth, and his shirt was torn at the shoulder.
More than that, something in his expression bothered her. Was that grief? Guilt? Anger? A mixture of all of them?
She stepped toward him. “Nash? What’s wrong?”
His gaze went toward the house, and he frowned. “They’re working on Jacob.”
“How bad is it?”
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “It could go either way right now.”
Wren’s stomach tightened.
Nash stared toward the ambulance. “I don’t even know whose hand was on the trigger when it went off.”
“You were protecting us.”
His jaw flexed.
“Nash.” Wren stepped closer. “It was self-defense.”
“I know. At least, logically, I know that. Emotionally . . . that’s a different story.”
Wren followed his gaze toward the house and understood how the whole incident that had just played out was too similar to the incident that had put a bullet in his knee.
“If Jacob dies, we may never know everything.” Nash looked at her, a war going on in his gaze. “The answers will die with him.”
“I know.” She swallowed. “There are still a hundred questions.”
“At least.”
Wren glanced back toward Mason. He was sitting beside Cody now, letting the paramedic shine a light into his eyes. Cody kept one hand firmly on his shoulder.
“But we have Mason,” she whispered. “We got him back. Whatever happens with Jacob, whatever we don’t know, whatever we might never know . . . Mason is here.”
Something eased just slightly in Nash’s expression. “Yeah, he is.”
“And I’m still here. For you. Whatever you need. You saved my son’s life.” Wren looked at him another second. Then she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around him.
Nash went still at first, then one arm came around her, and he pulled her close.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “For everything.”
His hold tightened for half a second.
Wren pulled back, and their eyes met. Something passed between them. Something she didn’t have the energy—or courage—to name right now.
Apparently, Nash didn’t either.
Neither of them looked away, though.
“Sorry to interrupt.” Prine had a notebook in one hand.
Wren stepped back.
“I need statements from both of you. Separately, while it’s fresh.” Prine turned to Nash. “You first.”
“Of course.”
“Before we start, I want to make sure we understand each other.” Prine let a beat go by.
“You forced entry into a private residence with no warrant. You brought a civilian through that door with you. You’re on medical leave and forty miles outside anything resembling your jurisdiction.
A man is on that stretcher with a hole in his chest.”
Nash didn’t answer.
“Your agency is going to open its own review. So is my office. So is the district attorney, because that’s how this works.” She clicked her pen. “The gun stays in evidence. Your phone stays with me tonight.”
“Understood.”
“You’ll be cleared.” Prine’s voice stayed even. “I’ve been doing this twenty-two years, and I can tell you how it ends. Two witnesses, a kidnapped child, a weapon in his hand.”
Nash’s jaw tightened. “That’s not the part I’m worried about.”
Something shifted in her expression. “No. I don’t imagine it is.”
Wren looked between them, and something cold worked its way up her spine. She’d heard the whole story in that hospital cafeteria. The review board. The clean report. A mother on the news saying his name.
He’d been cleared then too.
“How long?” Nash asked.
“Weeks. Months if the DA drags it.” Prine tucked the notebook under her arm. “And if he dies before morning, everything I just said gets longer and louder.”
“I know.”
“One more thing.” She glanced toward the ambulance. “You’re not part of this investigation anymore. Not the interviews, not the evidence, none of it. You’re a subject of one now. I’d have said that whether you were TBI or not.”
Nash absorbed that without argument.
Prine walked toward the cruiser and waited for him to follow.
He looked back at Wren before he went, and she couldn’t read a thing on his face.
Nash stood near the edge of the yard and watched the paramedics work around Jacob.
He knew better than to stare, but he did it anyway.
Every few seconds, the scene inside the house replayed in his head.
Jacob twisting beneath him. The gun trapped between them. The barrel moving. The shot.
For half a second after the gun went off, Nash hadn’t known who’d been hit.
That half second kept coming back.
So did another one.
A different house. A different case. A different man bleeding while Nash tried to convince himself he’d made the only choice he could.
And under it, the other thing. The thing he had no right to be turning over anymore.
Prine had been clear. He wasn’t part of this. Not the interviews, not the evidence, none of it.
His head hadn’t gotten the message.
A dead man in a root cellar off Pilcher Road—an arsonist nobody had an address on since 2020—and no reason on earth for him to be there.
Everett Voss, who owned that land under his mother’s name and had renewed a driver’s license in March using an address where he hadn’t lived in years.
Three curved lines carved low into a support timber, close enough to the dirt that a man would have to be sitting down to cut them.
Nash still couldn’t place that mark. He’d been trying since Monday. He had a feeling Luke hadn’t asked Christian about it yet either. Too much had happened. They still needed to, just to cover all their bases.
Then Jacob. We. There’s a greater purpose in all of it. A man who took a boy and left him fed and unharmed in a house he’d handed them the address to.
Somebody had wanted them in that house. Not to trap them. Jacob had been surprised to find them there.
You came too soon.
Which meant something else was supposed to have happened first.
Nash didn’t know what. He didn’t know who Roy had been checking on out past the county line for ten years, or who was still out there doing it now.
He only knew the shape of it was bigger than one man on a stretcher.
His chest tightened.
“Nash.”
He turned.
Luke crossed the yard toward him, his hands resting on his duty belt. “You okay?”
Nash almost laughed. “Depends on your definition.”
Luke stopped beside him and followed his gaze toward the ambulance. “You did the right thing in there.”
“A man was shot.”
“An armed man who kidnapped a child and was trying to take that child and his mother somewhere else was shot. The gun went off during the struggle.”
“Doesn’t change what I said.” Nash rubbed a hand over his jaw.
Luke was quiet a moment before adding, “You know what guilt does if you let it?”
Nash glanced at him. “I have some experience.”
“I figured.” Luke shifted his attention toward the mountains beyond the house. “People talk about guilt like carrying it proves you care. Like if you put it down, you’re saying what happened didn’t matter.”
Nash said nothing. He couldn’t argue.
“But that isn’t what God asks us to do.” Luke looked back at him. “There’s guilt that tells you when you’ve done wrong. That kind can lead you somewhere better. Then there’s the kind that keeps dragging you back to something you can’t change.”
The words landed harder than Nash wanted them to.
Luke continued, “You can spend the rest of your life carrying every person you couldn’t save and every decision you wish had gone differently. But eventually that weight gets so heavy that you can’t move forward with the people who still need you.”
Nash looked toward the house. Toward Wren. Toward Mason.
Luke gave his shoulder a brief squeeze. “You’re allowed to learn from the past without living in it.”
Nash swallowed hard, wishing it was that easy. “I’m not sure I know how to do that yet.”
“Neither do most of us.” Luke’s mouth tilted slightly. “Faith usually involves taking the next step before you feel ready.”
For the first time in a long while, Nash felt something inside him loosen.
It didn’t disappear. He wasn’t suddenly healed. He still had Allison. Henry. The shooting. All the choices he’d replayed so many times he could probably recite them in his sleep.
But maybe Luke was right. Maybe carrying the weight forever wasn’t the same thing as taking responsibility.
“Thanks.” Nash’s voice came out raspy.
Luke nodded. “Anytime.”
Nash turned and looked at Wren again. There was still so much they didn’t know.
But she was right. Mason was standing in front of him.
Jacob was still alive, at least for now.
And for the first time in a very long time, Nash wondered if maybe moving forward didn’t require having every answer first.
Maybe it was like Luke said: It only required taking the next step.