Her brother closes his eyes, and the beginnings of a wry smile tug at his lips. “Is she ever?”
Caia smiles through the piercing pain in her gut at the thought of her mother sitting behind that ancient mahogany desk, talking to the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety on a landline because she’s too stubborn and technophobic to use a cell phone. She tries not to focus on the image of her mother’s determined face, the stern but melodic quality of her voice as she kindly orders the man at the helm of the state troopers to do her a favor. Caia knows that phone call must’ve been no more than ten minutes, and she also knows Paul Freeman was on the other end of it scribbling down notes and nodding furiously, adamant that he’d send his best men to do the job. And Caiadefinitelyknows her mother probably followed up that statement with something along the lines ofMaybe send your best women instead, Paul. We tend to do things better. And faster.
“No,” Caia replies after the painful visual has receded. “She isn’t.”
“They did what she asked,” Crew supplies, reaching up to rub his thumb and forefinger over his brow, smoothing the worried creases. “They always do.”
“And that’s when Bellamy texted Grace,” Caia replies.
Crew swallows thickly. His eyes open to mere slits, and he stares downward as he nods. A grim, curt movement, like it hurts to confirm. His nostrils flare. “She lied.”
“She was scared,” Caia cuts in. “I think she lied because she didn’t want to be forced to leave the only place she’s ever felt safe.”
“And now?” Crew turns to look at her, his gaze pointed, unforgiving. “Mom could’ve died because Grace was too scared to tell us that Bellamy was a real threat. If she would’ve just been honest, we could’ve had the bastard locked up before he even had thethoughtto go after them in Victoria.”
Caia’s quiet for a moment, allowing him to suck the venom out of the bite in his heart, to get the blame and resentment off his chest. Her heart aches, knowing Crew had to come to terms with Grace’s confession at the same time as learning their parents were in the hospital. “You have a right to be angry, Crew,” Caia says.
Crew scoffs, mirthless and bitter.
Caia leans forward and grasps his forearm tightly. “I mean it. I’d be pissed, too. But you have to see what’s happening here. Grace is going back to Braxton. She’s probably there by now.” Crew’s face slackens slightly, and there’s a nearly imperceptible twitch under his left eye. Caia doubles down, knowing he’sactually listening now. “She’s going back—and not just because she thinks it’ll keep everyone safe, but because she thinksyoudon’t want her anymore. After all of this. By getting angry and blaming her, you’ve reaffirmed every terrible thing she’s ever thought about herself: She isn’t good enough. She doesn’t deserve to be at Halcyon. She’s a liar and scammer and her actions caused animals to die and people to get hurt. She’s going back to Braxton because she thinks it’s where she belongs.”
Crew is quiet for a long time, and Caia notices his eyes dart back and forth quickly, a motion she knows means he’s watching something unfold in his head.
“If she goes back to Braxton, he’s going to hurt her. Maybe worse,” Crew says.
He looks away, off to some unknowable place, tension building in his jaw. Caia stays quiet. Having grown up in the same house as him, she knows when it’s time to speak, to advise, and when it’s time to let him puzzle it out on his own.
His shoulders slump slightly as he continues. “I don’t like that she kept things from us.” Looking down at his hands, he stretches out his fingers, only to curl them back into fists. “I don’t like that she didn’t trust me enough to tell me what was going on. I thought—” Crew bites off the sentence, seeming to think better of it. Then, in a defeated, breathy kind of voice, he says, “I want her to trust me. Even when the truth isn’t pretty. Especially then.”
A soft smile tugs at Caia’s lips at the admission. At Crew confessing his true feelings and, for once, letting his heart win the never-ending battle against his head. His legs are long enough that they’re bent on the outside of the table rather than under it,and when his knee starts to bounce, she knows his mind is made up. But since he seems to be in a forthcoming mood, she can’t help but ask. “Do you love her?”
Crew’s knee ceases its restless movement. His head falls forward slowly, his chin dipped toward his chest. It hangs as if in prayer, a reverent, instinctual kind of reaction to such a question. The answer is one they bothknow, but she wants to hear it anyway. It feels like the right time to say it out loud—like a period at the end of a very long, very complicated sentence. The corner of Crew’s mouth quirks upward, and Caia’s own smile grows at the sight, at the stubborn line of his mouth helpless and defeated by the joy arising in him. Amid all the terror, he can’t help but smile when he thinks of Grace. “I didn’t know it was possible,” Crew says quietly, with an awed, slow shake of his head. “To love someone this much.”
With a single, resolute nod, Caia says, “Well, all right, then.”
Crew glances up at her, then tilts his head. He seems to be waiting for her to finish that statement, and Caia rolls her eyes, throwing her hands up.
Men.
“Go get her, you dumbass.”
Chapter 25
By noon on the second day, Grace is partway convinced that the sun is singling her out for its wrath. Her body is unmade by its relentlessness, and there’s no solution—if she keeps her clothes on, the heatstroke will come for her, and all alone out here, she’d likely die. So, she takes off her clothes, walks in meticulous, painfully slow lines up and down the field, and the sun continues to enact its particular brand of torture by beating its red remembrance onto her skin.
Her fingers and hands are dry and brittle, covered in rock dust that she can’t fully get off. Any nails she had are now jagged or ripped down to the quick, and a couple are bleeding at the cuticle, freckling the stones with dots of red as she tosses them haphazardly into the wheelbarrow at her hip.
The previous night, in the ramshackle tent they’ve given her to sleep in, she’d cried. An ugly, wailing kind of cry—she’d known she was far enough away that no one would hear her, so she’d let herself scream and whine and whimper, a rare moment of allowing self-pity to overtake all other emotions. She’d wallowed and lamented her life, angry and spiteful toward whatever cruel cosmic force had intervened and shown her what shecouldhave had—shown her the beauty that lay beyond thisbarbed-wire-lined hell.Halcyon, she’d thought, as her throat grew hoarse from the sobs. The sun never hurt at Halcyon. And how appropriate its name felt then—a long gone oasis—a place that, for Grace, would live on only in memories. She’d given herself the space to mourn its loss, but then had quickly come to realize that crying would only dehydrate her faster, and after endless hours without laying eyes on a single soul, she’d figured it would be smart to conserve any water that was still in her body.
The next morning, she’d started counting the rocks as she tossed them into the wheelbarrow, and she had gotten to about fifteen hundred when she had the thought to stop talking altogether, to stop exposing her mouth to the dust and exacerbating her thirst. But she’d mentally done the math after hitting that number, and a dark realization had begun to settle into her gut: This was going to takeweeks.
During that magical stretch of time at the summer pasture at Halcyon, she’d taken away a few heat-safety tips—the kind she’d never before been offered, because Bellamy never gave two shits if the people on his staff were healthy and knew how to protect themselves. But Forty cared. Forty cared for every single person and animal on Halcyon grounds. Forty was protective and loyal and kind; he’d become more of a father to Grace in those short months than any other man in her life, dead or alive. And when a little voice in her head had encouraged her to be strategic about her time, to seek the shade of trees, to sip water slowly and sporadically to encourage absorption and not urination, she realized it washisvoice. Deeper than the hollers of the Hill Country, raspy and gentle and seasoned with decades oflife and pain and love under his cowhide belt. Once that realization had set in, she’d listened, carving out times throughout the spread of the day to work, rest, and drink. All in the name of not overheating and dying alone out here, not becoming a corpse left to sizzle and shrivel up beneath the baking sun.
She’s counting in her head now, using eachclunkof the wheelbarrow to stay on track. She nears the edge of the left-hand quarter of the field, and behind her, piles of discarded rocks continue to grow taller, spread out evenly beyond the perimeter. A cairn sits at the front of each one, all of them different but serving the same purpose—to remind Grace every time she looks at them that she is apersonand not merely a pawn in her uncle’s demented schemes. She’s the person who moved these stones. The person whose blood and sweat and tears coats them. The person who has tried to construct something lovely, even in the midst of a waking nightmare.
Trey brings her a hunk of overcooked steak and a dry, undercooked baked potato on a plate wrapped in foil at dinnertime. He refills her canteen from an old Igloo cooler sitting in the back of the Gator, and denies her with a laugh when she asks him to leave the whole thing. He drives off with a dismissive wave after remarking on how shocked he is with the little progress she’s made. Grace sits in the sad excuse for shade she’s found beneath a dying oak and eats, chewing the meat until her jaw hurts and taking tiny bites of the potato to avoid getting overly thirsty from its graininess. Her stomach begins to hurt upon finishing the meal, the result of hastily scarfing everything down. She should’ve known better—should’ve taken her time and rationed it out—but she was sohungry.So hungry that shecouldn’t sleep. She lies down on her back and breathes through her mouth for a while, hoping the pain will pass. Eventually, it does, and she gets back to work, because there is nothing else she can do. She returns to the field, to the unforgiving sun, to the rocks that seem to sprout from the ground like weeds.
Chapter 26
