She gathered the papers into a neat stack and slid them back into the white envelope Gray had carefully put them in for her.She placed the envelope in the bottom drawer of the hutch in the dining room beneath a tablecloth that hadn’t been used since Brent was alive.
Then she washed her coffee cup, turned off the lights, and went upstairs.
She checked on Noah.He was sprawled across his bed at an angle that defied the laws of physics, his question notebook open on the pillow beside him.She eased it away and set it on his nightstand.The open page read:Can fire burn memories?Ask Gray.
She closed her eyes against the quick sting of tears.
She checked on Cassidy.Her daughter was curled on her side, facing the wall, her observation notebook tucked under her arm the way other children kept stuffed animals.The protective posture of a girl who’d learned far too young that the adults around her sometimes needed watching.
Bonnie pulled the blanket up over Cassidy and stood there for a long time, looking down at the fierce, confident, brave daughter she’d raised.
Tomorrow she would be worthy of Cassidy.She would go to work.Sit by the mayor’s closed door and do her job because that was what she did.But the woman who walked into that office tomorrow would not be the same woman who had walked in yesterday.
Yesterday’s Bonnie had been loyal to a fault.Faithful for all the wrong reasons.
Tomorrow’s Bonnie was going to be brave.
12
Gray was at the station at seven in the morning, going through a stack of fire science coursework that had accumulated while he’d been focused on calving, organizing evidence, and the quiet, devastating collapse of a woman’s world.
He’d barely slept the past several nights.First, he’d laid awake fretting over how to tell Bonnie the truth.Then he’d laid awake afterward fretting about how Bonnie was reacting to the truth.
He had no frame of reference to even begin to understand how devastating it must have been to learn that her husband had been murdered and the prime suspect was her boss, a man to whom she owed her livelihood and security.
He was bad at emotions and feelings.He knew he was bad at them.Give him a data set, a genetic sequence, a thermal dynamics equation and he could find the answer.Give him a human being in pain and he was clueless.He could read fire behavior with the precision of expert.He didn’t even know where to start understanding the interior landscape of a woman whose entire framework for trusting anybody, ever again, had just disintegrated in front of him.
What he could do was be there.That much he’d figured out.Not crowd her.Not push.Just be steady and present and available.He’d sent the calf picture this morning because it was the only thing he could think of that might make her smile without requiring anything from her in return.
Now he sat in the fire station’s day room with his laptop open to his coursework and his brain refusing to cooperate.The words on the screen kept rearranging themselves into Bonnie’s voice saying,Both of them.The two men I trusted most in this world.
She’d nearly said something else.He’d seen it: the moment her mouth opened and then closed around a word she wasn’t ready to release.Something about Brent.Something beyond the simple grief of a widow.
He filed it away.He was good at filing things away and waiting for a pattern to emerge.Patience was one of his few social skills.
His phone rang.Cooper.
“You dropped off an envelope at my place last night,” Cooper said without preamble.
“I did.”
“Where did these emails come from?”
“Bonnie.”Gray set down his highlighter.“The mayor told her to shred a stack of documents.She read them first and kept the ones that mattered.”
A pause.“She kept them.”
Gray could practically hear Cooper processing the implications, not just of the emails but of Bonnie’s decision to preserve them.Cooper understood evidence, but he also understood people in a way Gray envied and would never replicate.
“Is she okay?”Cooper asked.
“No,” Gray said.“But she’s still standing.”
“These email addresses are anonymized.It’s going to take time to trace them.”
“How long?”
“A week, maybe two.I need to run them through some databases and see if the domains match anything on file.The amounts and dates give me a starting point.”
