"That's the priority." She pulls up the bank information she memorized from Flint's conversation. "Creede first, then Torres."
"You always this bossy before coffee?"
"I'm bossy after coffee too. The coffee just makes me more pleasant about it." She opens a cabinet, closes it, opens another. "This woman has six kinds of herbal tea and no actual coffee. What kind of cowgirl doesn't keep coffee in the house?"
"The kind who's in Montana. Check the pantry."
She finds the filters in the pantry and the coffee in a canister behind the oats, and she holds it up like a trophy with a grin that hits me square in the gut. The grin is unguarded and quick and it does things to me that have no business happening at seven in the morning in a kitchen that isn't ours.
She makes coffee with the focused competence she brings to everything, and I watch her from the table. The thing that's been eating at me for weeks takes another bite.
It started small, a flicker at the back of my brain that I couldn't place, like a word on the tip of my tongue that won't surface.
The journalist who showed up on the circuit asking questions about Grant Corbin cared too much, pushed too hard, and carried a grief she couldn't fully hide behind her press credentials and her sharp tongue.
Professionals care about stories. Kenna cares about Grant, not the story of Grant but Grant the person. The anger in her voice when she talks about his death isn't the anger of an investigator. It's the anger of someone who lost a part of themselves.
And then Kenna told me what Flint said.'You look like him. Around the eyes.'
I didn't say anything in the truck. I didn't push it.
I watched her deflect the comment with a practiced ease that told me the deflection wasn't new. She's heard it before. She expected to hear it.
Now I'm sitting at this table, watching her pour coffee into two mugs, and the pieces that have been floating in the back of my mind for weeks snap together with a sound I can almost hear.
It starts with the eyes.
Grant had a way of looking at you that made you feel like you were the only person in the room and simultaneously like he was seeing through every wall you'd built. His eyes narrowed when he was calculating, went wide and still when he was deciding whether to trust someone, and held yours without blinking when he'd made up his mind.
I stared into those eyes for over a decade of friendship. I watched them go bright with competition, dark with anger, soft with the kind of loyalty that makes a man drive through the night to help you.
Kenna has the same eyes. Not the color, but the way they work. The same shape, the same intensity, the same way they narrow when she's running numbers in her head and go wide when she's trying to hide something she doesn't want me to see.
The same unblinking hold when she's made a decision and won't be moved from it. It's the way she looks at the world, and it's identical to the way Grant looked at it, and I've been staring at that expression since Amarillo and refused to see what it meant.
But it's not just the eyes.
She tilts her head when she's working through a problem, a slight leftward angle that I've seen a thousand times across truck cabs and diner tables. Grant did the same thing, the same angle, the same unconscious gesture of a brain processing information faster than the mouth can deliver it.
I watched her do it at Albuquerque while she laid out the financial data, and something snagged in the back of my mind, and I let it go because I didn't want to pull the thread.
The stubbornness. Grant's stubbornness was legendary on the circuit. The man would argue a point past the point of reason, not because he was wrong but because surrender wasn't in his wiring.
Kenna does the same thing with the same set to her jaw and the same flat refusal to yield ground even when yielding would be easier.
I called it fire when I saw it in her. I called it pigheadedness when I saw it in Grant. It's the same trait wearing different clothes.
And the way she holds a coffee mug. Both hands wrapped around it, fingers laced, thumbs resting on the rim.
Grant did that in every diner from Amarillo to Tucson. I made fun of him for it once, said he held his coffee like a man warming his hands over a campfire. He told me to mind my own business.
Kenna is doing it right now, standing at the counter with her back to me, and the gesture is so identical it's like watching a ghost perform a familiar ritual.
The age is right. Grant was thirty-one. Kenna is twenty-eight.
Grant talked about a sister. He called her "my kid sister" or "the kid," the way older brothers do when the habit outlasts the age gap. He was private about his family, the way Grant was private about anything that mattered to him.
I heard her actual name maybe twice in all the years I knew him. Kenna. It didn't register when a journalist introduced herself as Kenna McEnroe, because it shouldn't have. It's a common enough name, and there was no reason to connect it to a dead friend's family.
