"Again, he wasn't wrong. Just substitute rodeo circuit for war zone and add a pissed off cowboy."
"I'm not pissed off. I'm focused."
"You white-knuckled the steering wheel for the last hundred miles. That's not focus. That's a man trying not to put his fist through something."
"Maybe I just don't like your driving commentary."
"You don't like anything right now. I'm just the most convenient target." She takes a sip of her coffee and looks at me sideways over the rim. "For the record, I prefer pissed off cowboy to silent cowboy. At least this version talks."
I shouldn't smile. I don't smile. My mouth pulls sideways before I can stop it, and she sees it, and the fact that she sees it means the ice just cracked whether I wanted it to or not.
"Tell me about the last time you saw him," I say.
She sets the coffee in the cup holder. Her hands settle in her lap, fingers laced, and she stares through the windshield at the red sky.
"Thanksgiving," she says. "He drove down to my apartment in Austin. Brought a store-bought pumpkin pie and a bottle of tequila, which was Grant's idea of holiday cooking."
"That man thought seasoning a steak meant finding the saltshaker."
"You're being generous. He thought seasoning a steak meant pointing at the saltshaker and asking someone else to hand it to him." She almost smiles, and the expression is complicated, grief and fondness braided together in the same muscle. "We watched football and ate pie straight from the tin and argued about whether I should move to a bigger market. He thought I was wasting my talent at the paper. I thought he was deflecting because he didn't want to talk about whatever was eating him."
"That was right around the time he started digging into Tyler's death."
"I know that now. At the time, I just thought he'd met someone and was being cagey about it." She turns the key between her fingers. "He was distracted that whole visit.Checking his phone constantly, leaving the room to take calls. I asked him three times what was going on, and he gave me three different versions of nothing."
"Three versions of nothing. That's Grant. He had more ways to say nothing than anybody I ever met."
"He once spent forty-five minutes telling me about a horse he was considering buying, and I found out later the horse didn't exist. He'd invented an entire horse to avoid telling me he'd broken his collarbone."
"Was it the paint? He told me that story too. Said he was thinking about a paint mare with a bowed tendon and a bad attitude."
"That's the one. I researched equine tendon injuries for a week before I figured out the horse was fictional."
I laugh. The sound surprises me, a rough scrape of noise that doesn't feel like it belongs in this truck, in this day, in this war. But it's there. And Kenna's looking at me like she just watched something impossible happen, and the expression on her face hits me somewhere I wasn't braced for, in a way that has nothing to do with anger.
The image hits me in the gut, not the head. Grant in somebody's apartment kitchen, boots off, hat on the counter, eating pie from a tin while his phone buzzed with calls about drugged bulls and dead riders.
I can see the exact set of his jaw when Kenna asked what was wrong, the deflection he'd have used, the way he'd have grinned and changed the subject because Grant could charm his way out of a burning building. The last normal day he had with the person he loved most, and he spent it lying to her face to keep her safe.
The irony of that is not lost on me. Lying to the people you love to keep them safe is apparently a Corbin family trait. His sister inherited it along with his eyes.
"Grant and I drove this road once," I say. "After a three-day event in Durango. We were so beat up we could barely get into the truck. He had a separated shoulder and I had two cracked ribs, and we argued the whole way about who was less injured and therefore had to drive."
"Who won?"
"He did. He always won the arguments. Said God gave me the body for riding and him the brain for talking, and that division of labor had served us well for a decade."
Kenna laughs. The sound is sudden and real and it lands somewhere under my ribs that I wasn't guarding. She cuts it short, presses her lips together, and looks out the window.
"He'd say that," she says. "He always thought he was the smart one."
"He was the smart one. I'm just the one who's too stubborn to die."
"Stubborn is underselling it. I've seen mules with more give."
"You comparing me to a mule?"
"I'm comparing you to a mule and the mule is coming out ahead on personality." She glances at me, and the challenge in her eyes is the same challenge that hooked me the first night, back when she was a journalist with a sharp mouth and I was a rider with a death wish and neither of us knew we were both lying about who we were. "Grant wouldn't have trusted you with his dying words if you were just muscle. He trusted you because you're the most relentless person he knew, and coming from Grant, that's saying something."
