I took the glass. “Hey.”
He was quiet for a moment. Blaze did quiet differently than Fury. Where Fury’s silence was restless, Blaze’s was the opposite. He was thinking. He always looked like he was thinking.
“Beautiful ceremony,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Graham’s a good man.”
“He is.”
Another pause. He sipped his whisky. In the pasture, Cassie lifted her head and looked at us, evaluated, dismissed, went back to grazing.
“I need to tell you something,” Blaze said. “I’ve been waiting for the right time, and there probably isn’t one, but I can’t keep it from you any longer.”
I turned to face him. His voice had shifted. The professor cadence, steady and deliberate.
“I’ve been investigating Mom and Dad’s deaths,” he said.
The world went still.
“The car accident,” I said.
“It wasn’t an accident.”
The pasture. The music. The laughter from the tent. All of it receded until there was nothing but Blaze’s face and the words hanging between us.
“I’ve been looking into it for over two years now,” he said. “I started with the police report. The original investigationconcluded a semi-truck crossed the center line. The driver had been drinking at a truck stop for hours before he got behind the wheel. He died in the crash too. Case closed. Drunk driver, tragic accident, no one left to prosecute.”
“I know. I’ve read the report.”
“So did I. I’ve read it more times than I can count. And I started pulling threads.” He turned to face me fully. “The timing, Rose. Dad was killed two weeks before he was scheduled to testify against Miguel Ángel Ochoa. The lead cartel boss. The man whose empire Dad had exposed.”
“That could be a coincidence.”
“It could. Except I tracked down one of the original investigating detectives. He’s retired now, living in Stockton. And he told me something that never made it into the official report.” Blaze’s voice dropped. “The truck driver didn’t die from blunt trauma in the crash, Rose. He was strangled.”
The word landed like a stone in still water.
“Strangled,” I repeated.
“There were ligature marks on his neck. The detective said the marks weren’t obvious, and also, it didn’t make sense. How does a strangled man drive a semi-truck? So they filed it away. Left it out of the report. Pretended it didn’t exist because it broke the narrative.”
“Blaze—”
“There’s something else.” His jaw was tight, and his eyes held something older than the rest of him. “I was eleven. I was in the backseat with you and Fury. You were two, you were screaming. Fury was trying to shield you. And I—” He stopped. Swallowed.“I’ve always thought I saw something. After the crash. Before the other cars arrived. Someone outside the wreck, looking in at us. Looking at the three of us in the backseat.”
My skin went cold.
“A woman,” Blaze said quietly. “She looked right at me. And then a car came around the bend and she was gone.”
He let that sit between us.
“Someone else was driving that truck, Rose. Someone who crossed the center line on purpose and walked away from the crash alive. And I believe Ochoa sent them.”
I set down my whisky because my hands weren’t steady enough to hold it.
“Ochoa is in federal prison,” Blaze continued. “Has been since 1999. He’s seventy-four years old and he’s never getting out. But he’s alive. And he knows what happened.”
