I let that land and don't respond, because responding would mean softening, and softening would mean reaching across the console, and reaching across the console would mean putting my hands on her, and my hands on her right now would not be gentle.
"I told you about the phone call the night before Las Cruces. How he told me what he’d found out, about how I got there too late. But at the end of the call he said something I didn't understand at the time. He said,'Look after my sister. She'll come looking when she hears. She's stubborn like me. Don't let her do anything stupid.'"
The silence in the cab is absolute. "He knew," Kenna says. Her voice is barely audible. "He knew I'd come."
"He knew you better than he knew anyone. He knew you'd show up on this circuit with some kind of plan and enough stubbornness to get yourself killed." The next part sticks in my throat. I have to shove it out. "He asked me to look after you, and instead I?—"
I stop. The sentence bucks like something I can't stay on top of.
"Instead you what?" Kenna asks.
"Instead I did a pretty lousy job of it."
"You kept me alive through a car chase, a break-in, at least two situations where someone was actively trying to kill us. That's not lousy. That's pretty damn good."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know what you mean." Her voice is quiet. Steady. She's giving me the exit ramp, letting me not say the thing we both know is sitting in the cab between us. She could push. She doesn't.
"I should've figured it out sooner," I say, and the words come out rough, scraped raw, the way they do when I'm saying something I'll regret. "Who you were. I had all the pieces. Your age, your background, the way you talked about the circuit like it was personal. The way you looked at the Las Cruces footage." I stare at the road. "I didn't figure it out because I didn't want to. Because figuring it out meant'the woman I'—" I stop again.Recalibrate. "It meant everything got complicated. And I liked it uncomplicated."
The admission is sideways and incomplete and it reveals more than I intended, which is exactly how I handle every conversation that matters. Kenna is quiet for a long time. She doesn't push for the word I swallowed, the one that would've come after'the woman I.'She just lets the silence hold it.
"For what it's worth," she says, "I usually do too, but sometimes complicated leads to better things."
The miles pass. The mesas flatten.
The silence between us shifts from hostile to something with weight and heat.
Near the outskirts of Socorro, the sun gone and the stars punching through above the desert, I ask the question that's been sitting on my tongue since Creede.
"Would Grant have wanted this? Us, working together?"
Kenna doesn't hesitate. "Grant would have wanted whoever killed him to burn. He wouldn't care how we got there. As for our sleeping together? I think it was something he would have engineered down the road. He always said you were the best man he ever knew, and I think he'd want that for me."
The answer is so immediate and so certain that I look at her. In the dashboard light, her face is all angles and conviction, the jaw set, the eyes flat and sure. She's Grant's sister. She fought her way onto a circuit where people get killed for asking questions, and she did this alone.
I hate that she lied. I respect that she fought. The contradiction won't go down no matter how many times I swallow it.
We hit the outskirts of Albuquerque as the last light dies behind the mesas. "The bank won't be open until morning," Kenna says. "We need somewhere to sleep."
"I know a place. Another rider's house. He's on the road, owes me a favor, said I can use it whenever."
"Does this other rider have actual coffee?"
"He has a Keurig and a bottle of Jack Daniels."
"That'll do."
I pull off the interstate and head toward the North Valley. The rider's house is a small adobe on a quiet street lined with cottonwoods. I find the key beneath a clay pot by the side gate and let us in through the kitchen door.
The house is dark and smells like dust and leather. Two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen with tile counters and a window that faces the Sandias. I turn on a lamp and the room fills with warm yellow light, and the domesticity of it is jarring against the backdrop of everything we've been through.
Kenna finds the Jack Daniels before I find the light switch in the hallway. She pours two glasses without asking and slides one across the counter toward me. Our fingers come within an inch of touching, and the inch is a canyon, and neither of us bridges it.
"To Grant," she says, and lifts her glass.
"To Grant."
