That wasn’t entirely true.
But he thought she probably knew that already.
Rowan hesitated. Then finally, she let the bag slide from her shoulder onto the concrete floor. “Okay. But we have to make this quick. If I’m leaving, I don’t have much time.”
Rowan sat curled beneath a blanket on a wicker love seat. Wes sat beside her.
She stared at the dark pasture in the distance as she tried to sort her thoughts. “How did you know I might leave?”
Wes shrugged. “Because I know you.”
“I meant what I said in the garage. I don’t want anyone else getting hurt because of me.”
“I know.” Wes leaned back against the seat.
The porch light caught the edge of his jaw, softening the harder lines tension had carved there over the past few days.
A moment of silence passed before Rowan said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She looked at him. “What happened to you as a Marshal? Why did you quit?”
His jaw flexed, and he stared straight ahead.
For a moment, she thought he might not answer. Then he did.
“His name was Danny Wilson. He was my partner. Two years.” He paused. “You spend that much time working with someone, you stop thinking of them as a colleague. He was the person I’d have called if anything went wrong. The person I trusted without having to decide to.”
Rowan waited for him to continue.
“The two of us were running an undercover operation. Infiltrating a network that hunted protected witnesses—people who’d testified against some very dangerous people and trusted us to keep them safe. I’d been inside for eight months. Danny was my contact on the outside. The only person who knew everything about where I was and who I was supposed to be.”
He paused and drew in a deep breath before continuing.
“My cover was blown. Not from inside the network. From ours.” He exhaled. “Danny had been compromised. I still don’tknow exactly how it happened—whether someone got to him, whether he made a choice, whether he was just careless with something he should have protected.” He paused again. “I’ve stopped trying to figure out which one it was.”
“Because it doesn’t change what happened,” Rowan murmured.
“Exactly.” He nodded once. “There was a witness. Young woman. Twenty-four years old. She’d testified against people who wanted her dead. She’d done everything we asked of her.” His jaw tightened. “By the time I understood what had happened to my cover, I couldn’t get to her in time.”
The sound of crickets filled the space between them.
“She died because someone knew where she was,” he said. “Someone knew because Danny told them, or because Danny told someone who told them, or because Danny left something somewhere he shouldn’t have. The investigation cleared him of intentional wrongdoing. Said it was a security failure. Procedural. I resigned three days after the report came out.”
“And Danny?”
“He tried to reach me afterward. Several times.” He looked at his hands. “I never took the call.”
Rowan watched him, the weight of the moment hitting her.
“Remington was already mine by then.” He glanced at the dog. “There was a period after I resigned when I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t doing well. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t need to make it more than it was. But I’d built my life around being someone people could trust with the things that mattered most. Then I found out the person I’d trusted most had cost someone everything.”
He paused as if to gather his thoughts.
“Remington got me up in the morning. That sounds simple. Itwassimple. But simple was what I needed.”
Rowan’s heart pounded in her ears. She hadn’t expected this. But she knew what it was costing Wes to share this.
