Chapter 7
chapter
seven
Griff
I find the closed door and I lean my forehead against the frame of it.
“Hope.”
Nothing.
“I’m not mad at you, sweetheart.” The words come out low, aimed at the seam of the door.
And I’m not even going to investigate where the term of endearment came from.
“I need you to hear that. I’m not—none of that was you.
I’m mad at myself, and I aimed it at you, and that’s a coward’s move and I know it. ”
A long pause. Then, muffled: “You called me a distraction.”
“You are.” I close my eyes. “That’s the problem.
Not you. Me. I made a bad call tonight because I was worried about you, and I’ve spent eleven years never making that call, and it rattled me.
I should’ve sent Tate to close the crossings and stayed at command where I belong.
Instead I’m out of commission when my people need me running point, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine. ”
The door opens.
She’s got her arms crossed and her eyes are still a little wet, her face is blotchy. Still, somehow, she is the best thing I’ve ever looked at.
“I need you to hear me when I tell you that I’m not some incompetent moron who needs rescuing every other minute.
I know that’s how my stupid watch has made it seem, but I’ve managed to take care of myself—alone, I might add—for nearly three decades.
I don’t need a big grumpy man swooping in to rescue me because he thinks I’m too silly to take care of myself properly. ”
“Is that what you think?” I ask.
“Obviously. Why else would I be a distraction?”
I step closer, allowing myself to loom over her.
“You’re a distraction because all I can think about is when I can see you again.
What new antic will allow me to help you with something?
What adorable things will you say to me when I arrive and find you in an awkward situation?
What would you do if I just showed up and kiss the hell out of you?
That’s the kind of distraction I meant. I’ve never, for a second, thought you were incompetent. ”
“Ohh,” she says.
“Yeah, oh.”
“I thought you didn’t like me at all,” she says.
“Quite the contrary.” I let my eyes drop to hover at her ample breasts that are stretching her graphic t-shirt. The shirt reads: Muscle Whisperer. I nod towards her. “What does that mean?”
“I’m a massage therapist.”
My first thought is to be a jealous motherfucker because the idea of her putting her hands on another man makes me feel a little crazy. But that’s not really me. I’ve never been the jealous type.
“Okay, Sheriff, then let me ask you something.” Her voice is steadier now. “What, exactly, can’t you do from here?”
“What?”
“Command point. Whatever that is. What is it you’d be doing at the station right this second that you physically cannot do in my house with a phone and a laptop?
” She lifts a shoulder. “You’d just be sitting at a desk there instead of a table here, telling deputies what to do. So do that here.” Her eyes hold mine.
I open my mouth to argue with her, but she’s right.
“It is not your job to personally save every single person in this county with your own two hands. It’s your job to make sure that the word gets out so that people can do what they can to keep themselves safe.
Those aren’t the same thing, and I think somewhere along the way,” she pokes me in the chest. “Somebody let you forget that.”
I look at her for a long moment.
Eleven years. Countless number of cases and victims. A whole ruined marriage—or rather a near marriage; we never did walk down that aisle.
But yeah, I built my career on the idea that if I wanted a thing done right and done safe, I had to be the one doing everything.
And this woman with her faulty watch and baked goods just took it apart in about four sentences.
“Get me the coffee,” I say, rough. “And the plate.”
Something moves across her face. Not quite a smile but very close.
“Now you want the cookies,” she says.
“Now I want the cookies.”
Half an hour later and I know exactly how you run a flood response from a small farmhouse at the end of Farm Road 12.
You put your phone on speaker on the kitchen table.
You get your deputies checked in one by one—Tate on the barricades, Reyes coordinating with the fire crew, everybody accounted for.
You call the county Emergency Operations Center, which Burton evidently put in place during his tenure as sheriff, and you stop trying to be the county EOC.
And you let the woman across the table, who will not sit still, who cannot sit still, make herself useful, because she’d combust otherwise.
Turns out the other thing Sheriff Burton did was to leave a list. Reyes emailed it to me.
It’s a page of names, the folks out in the county who don’t trust phone alerts, won’t look at a screen, have to be called, by a human, one at a time, and talked through it.
Miss Ada who’s ninety-one and won’t leave her cats.
The Kowalskis with the trailer out near the lavender farms. And about a dozen more.
I’d have done them myself, but Hope pulled her chair closer and started calling at the top of the list.
I listen to her with half an ear as she charms and cajoles and gently bullies a dozen stubborn old people onto higher ground—no, Miss Ada, bring the cats, of course bring the cats, put ‘em in the carrier, I’ll hold while you do it—and she keeps my coffee full without being asked, and slides a fresh cookie onto the plate every time one disappears, and slowly, call by call, name by name, the county gets accounted for.
And somewhere in there, without deciding to, I relax.
I can’t tell you the last time that happened. Shoulders down. Jaw loose. The kind of relief from a man who has, for once, let something be carried by someone else’s hands.
She catches me watching her and lifts an eyebrow. “What?”
“Nothing.” I look back at my cell. “You’re good at that.”
“I’m good with people who don’t want help.” She says it light, but her eyes flick to me when she does.
It’s somewhere past midnight when the scare comes.
A call unaccounted for out near Little Creek, which becomes a big ass river if the rain falls in the right place.
My deputies haven’t heard back from them and I know Hope hadn’t reached them when she tried.
And suddenly I’m back in it, fully in it, the old cold dropping over me like a net while Reyes runs a unit out to check.
I sit useless at a kitchen table two miles away and wait, which is the thing I have never once in my life been able to do.
Hope sets a cookie by my hand.
“Not everything gets fixed with a goddamn cookie, Hope.”
The words are ugly the second they’re out.
I know it. I’ve done it again, taken the worst thing in me and thrown it at the softest target in the room.
Because she’s easy aim. She’s bright, because she’s warm, and I know, just like Tara, she won’t be able to handle all the darkness my job provides.
Small town sheriffs don’t get near as much as a big city detective, but the ugliness of the world can find you anywhere. Hope’s too soft to handle all of that.
I temper my voice when I speak again. “I only mean that sometimes things can’t be fixed. There’s a lot of nastiness out there and no amount of sunshine can change that.”
She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t fire back. She goes very quiet, and she pushes back the chair across from me and stands, and she says, in a voice I’ve never heard her use—flat, level, old—“You think I don’t know about the evil and darkness that sometimes life brings?”
She pulls off her shirt and normally I’d be focused on the pretty bra she just revealed. But it doesn’t take me long to hone in on the scars across the softness of her stomach. Small, round white circles scattered all over her lower torso.
“Cigarette burns,” I say.
She nods. Then she turns, and I see the thinner white lines that crisscross over her back.
“The cigarettes were how my mother taught me lessons. The back was one of her live-in boyfriends who thought it was fun to whip me with a willow tree switch.”
“Christ, Hope.” I swallow thickly. “I had no idea.”
“Obviously. Because I don’t advertise it.
” She puts her shirt back on then leans forward on the table, getting closer to me.
“That dark part of my life… before I was removed and became a ward of the state, that’s a moment in my story.
It’s not my whole story. It doesn’t tell about how that scared little girl was put into a foster home with two other little girls and how the three of them became a family unit that has lasted into their adulthood.
It doesn’t tell how I put myself through school so I could show people that sometimes touch can heal.
It doesn’t tell about my extreme stubbornness or my affinity for baking or the fact that bright colors make me feel calm.
“The darkness isn’t my story. It’s just a part of it. So don’t tell me I don’t know about it, Sheriff,” she finishes, soft. “I just don’t choose to decorate with it.”
The radio crackles. Reyes: the unaccounted-for address is clear—folks evacuated to a daughter’s place hours ago and just hadn’t told anyone. Everybody’s safe. Everybody’s accounted for.
I barely hear it. I’m looking at Hope Bailey like I’ve never seen her before, because I haven’t. At least not all of her. I’d made her a caricature in my mind, a one-dimensional woman I felt drawn to, but didn’t understand.
Later—everyone safe, the phone finally quiet, the rain finally easing to something that sounds like rain again—I find her curled in the corner of her couch. I sit down on the other end of it, close, in my ridiculous robe.
“I’m sorry. For yelling. For making assumptions.
For everything.” I scrub a hand down my face.
“I have to ask you something, because I genuinely don’t understand it.
How do you—” I gesture at all of her. You’re so warm and light.
Like walking sunshine. Yet you’ve endured more than most people could even imagine.
Certainly more than me. Yet, you’re the brightest person I’ve ever met. How?”
She’s quiet a moment, turning her mug in her hands.
“Because it’s a choice,” she says. “Every single day. I choose it. My past is real; I’m not pretending it isn’t.
It still makes me very sad, if I let it, that my mother loved drugs more than she ever loved me.
But that only says things about her, not me.
I was a child and I did nothing wrong to deserve the abuse.
So I just refuse to let it be the thing that drives. ”
She looks up at me. “And here’s the part you won’t want to hear, Mr. Grumpy Sheriff.
I would walk through every bit of it again to get to Cora and Jules.
” A small shrug, and then a small smile that wrecks me.
“So I don’t hate the fire. I walked through it and it brought me home.
That’s worth choosing to be happy about. That’s worth cookies.”
I don’t have a single word.
She’s the answer to a question I quit asking years ago.
She’s proof of the thing I decided wasn’t possible—that you can hold the darkness and still choose the light.
That letting someone all the way in isn’t a liability.
That maybe, just maybe, the problem with mine and Tara’s relationship was simply that we didn’t match.
She couldn’t handle my job. And then I built an entire fortress on the belief that meant no one could.