Except everything. Every gesture, every expression, every flash of stubbornness and intelligence. The way she looks at me should have told me from day one.
She sets the mug in front of me, sits down across the table, picks up her own coffee, and wraps both hands around it. The gesture is so identical to one I watched Grant do a thousand times in a thousand diners across the Southwest Circuit that my throat tightens.
"Who are you?"
The words come out flat; more demand than question.
Kenna's hands go still on the mug. Her eyes find mine, and there it is.
The flicker. The fraction of a second where the mask slips and the truth is visible underneath, as obvious as a brand on hide.
"I'm Kenna McEnroe. Freelance journalist."
"Try again."
"Colt."
"You've got Grant's eyes." My voice is steady, which is a miracle, because the rest of me is coming apart. "The same expression. The same way you look at people when you're deciding whether they're worth your time. I've been staring at that look since Amarillo, and I finally figured out where I've seen it before. So I'm going to ask you one more time, and you're going to tell me the truth."
She sets the mug down. Her thumbnail presses into her index finger, the same gesture I've watched her make behind the chutes in Amarillo and at the bar and in a dozen quiet moments when she thought I wasn't looking. I filed it away as a nervous habit. Now I know what it means. Her hands are steady everywhere except that one small point of pressure. Her face is not.
"Who the hell are you?"
The kitchen is silent. The mountains outside the window don't move. The coffee maker makes a small settling sound, the last drops hitting the hot plate, and it's the loudest thing in the room.
"Kenna Corbin," she says. "Grant's sister."
The name hits me like a bull's hoof to the sternum.
The room tilts. Not physically, but something shifts in the architecture of everything I've built since she walked onto this circuit, and it all goes sideways at once.
I grip the edge of the table because my hands need something solid, and the wood grain under my fingers is the only thing in this kitchen that hasn't just changed meaning.
My stomach turns over. Not nausea exactly, but the deep, gut-level wrongness of a man who's been standing on what he thought was solid ground and just felt it give way beneath him. Every conversation replays. Every kiss. Every time she looked at me with those eyes that I couldn't place. Every time I held her and felt the shape of her grief and thought it mirrored mine.
It didn't mirror mine. It was the same grief, coming from the same source, and she knew it the entire time.
I knew. I knew before I asked. The confirmation shouldn't change anything, because the evidence was already there, stacked up in the familiar expression and the grief and the fire she brings to this investigation.
The confirmation changes everything.
"You've been lying to me since the first night."
"Yes."
"Your name. Your job. Your reason for being on this circuit. Every conversation. Every moment."
"I am a journalist, Colt. That part is real. But yes, my last name and my reason for being here and everything else I told you about who I am was a lie."
"The night in the motel in Albuquerque. The night in the bunkhouse. You were lying to me while I was inside you."
Her chin lifts, almost imperceptibly. "My identity was a lie. What happened between us was not."
I push back from the table. The chair screeches against the tile.
I need distance. The walls of this kitchen are too close and her face is too familiar and the rage building in my gut is the kind that doesn't distinguish between people who deserve it and people who are just standing too close.
"Grant's sister." I say it to the window, to the mountains, to anyone other than her. "Grant Corbin's little sister. The one he raised. The one he talked about like she was the only good thing in his life."
