At home, Noah was at the kitchen table with his question notebook open, printing carefully with a pencil that needed sharpening.He’d been at Jenna’s for the afternoon, and Bobby Foster had apparently introduced him to the concept of quicksand, which had generated an entire page of new questions.
“Mom, can a cow get stuck in quicksand?”
“I don’t know for sure, Sweetheart, but I expect it could.”
“What about a really big calf?Like the polar bear calves?”
“You’d have to ask Gray.I know that quicksand has some ability to support weight, but I have no idea how heavy an object would have to be to sink in it.I would think the object’s shape might affect if it sinks and how fast it sinks, too.”
That provoked an extended session of scribbling in the notebook.
“I wrote down all my questions.”He held up the notebook.“Also, why do people keep secrets?”
Bonnie, who was filling a pot of water at the sink, was shocked into stillness and almost filled the pot to overflowing.As she poured some of the water out into the sink., she asked, “What do you mean?”
“Bobby said his mom keeps a secret recipe for pie and won’t share it with anyone.Why would you keep a recipe secret?What if you die and then nobody can make the pie?”
Bonnie exhaled.Pie.He was talking about pie.“Some people keep secrets because they’re protecting something important to them.”
“But pie is important toeverybody.”
She smiled.“That’s an excellent point.”
Noah turned the page.“Also, can you tell if someone is lying?Like, is there a way to know for sure?”
Bonnie set the pot on the stove and turned on the burner.She watched the blue flame catch and spread beneath the metal.“Sometimes,” she said carefully.“Sometimes you can tell.”
“How?”
“You pay attention to what people do, not just what they say.If the two things don’t match, that’s usually a clue.”
Noah wrote this down with great seriousness.Bonnie watched him write and felt an ache in her chest.She was keeping secrets from the very child she’d just told how to watch for liars.But Noah was far too young to tell that his father had been murdered.And frankly, she would rather wait a few more years before she sprang news like that on Cassidy, either.
Speaking of Cassidy, she appeared in the kitchen doorway.She looked at Bonnie with her clear, direct gaze and said, “I told Gray you’ve been sad.”
Bonnie’s hand tightened on the box of spaghetti she was opening.“Cassidy ...”She stopped herself from chiding Cassidy for saying something like that to an outsider.But Gray wasn’t an outsider to her family any more, now, was he?Instead, she merely asked, “What did he have to say about that?”
“He said he’s trying to help you with something hard.He said it wasn’t about us.”She paused.“He didn’t lie.I checked.I read a book on ways to know if people are lying, and he didn’t have any tells.”
Well okay, then.She supposed she was glad to know Gray had passed her daughter’s honesty vetting.
Bonnie looked at Cassidy and felt a pang of grief.She wished there was some way to protect her children from seeing her pain, but her kids were too smart and too observant, not to mention they were now of an age where they would notice her feelings no matter how carefully she tried to pretend everything was okay.
“I’m okay, Baby,” she said softly.
Cassidy’s expression said she knew that wasn’t entirely true but was willing to accept it as a working hypothesis.She sat down at the table across from Noah and opened her own book.
The three of them occupied the kitchen in a silence that felt, to Bonnie, like the safest place in the world.Her children were warm and fed and doing homework in a house with a lock on the door and a porch light she would always leave on for them.
Whatever was happening with the mayor and the investigation and the slow unraveling of everything she’d believed about her life, none of it touched this kitchen.This place, this safe place called home, was real.These two small people were real.And she loved them with all her heart.
She made dinner and didn’t think about Lucas Shoemacher for almost a full hour.It was the longest stretch she’d managed in weeks.
Gray’s phone rang at nine-fifteen, after he’d finally read three pages of his fire dynamics textbook without his mind wandering to Bonnie or Cassidy or his father or any of the other humans who had recently and inconveniently complicated his life.In moments like this he almost missed his life before, organized completely around spreadsheets, textbooks, and cattle genetics.Almost.
His caller ID read,Coop.
“I’ve got names,” Cooper said without preamble.
