The sight of her in my t-shirt hits me with the same proprietary heat it did the first time, back in Albuquerque, whenshe borrowed a flannel shirt because the room was cold and she hadn't packed for it. I spent the rest of that night trying not to stare at the way the fabric fell against her body. I'm no better at it now than I was then.
"Stop looking at me like that," she says, climbing into bed.
"Like what?"
"Like you're deciding between sleep and something that requires significantly more energy."
"I'm always deciding that around you. You make it difficult."
"Good." She curls on her side with one hand tucked under her chin and her eyes already heavy. "Hold that thought until morning."
I shower with the water as hot as the motel plumbing will give me, washing off courthouse sweat and cemetery dust and the long miles south. By the time I kill the light and slide in beside her, she's out. I settle my arm across her waist, and she shifts back against me without waking, her body fitting against mine with the ease of a habit that's still new enough to surprise me.
I breathe in the motel shampoo and the scent underneath it that belongs only to her, clean skin and something faintly sweet that I've never been able to name but would recognize blind.
I think about the deposition. About Whitfield's pen and Torres's suppressed smile and the word'manipulated'coming through the conference room door.
I think about Kenna sitting in that chair, fielding questions about her dead brother from a woman whose client ordered his murder, and answering with a composure that told a defense attorney billing more per hour than I earn per ride to review her own client's financials.
I think about Flint's son. Ten years in silence. A father who watched the circuit grind forward over the grave of his boy and said nothing because saying something meant riskingeverything, and in the end the silence cost him more than the risk ever could have.
Grant could have been another name on that list of quiet losses, another suspicious accident that nobody questioned. He could have been another family left to grieve alone, visiting a stone on a hill while the questions it raised stayed too dangerous to ask out loud. The difference is that Grant fought back. Kenna picked up where he left off. And now Flint is finally fighting too, a decade late, carrying his boy's name into a federal courtroom where it can do what he was too scared to let it do when it mattered most.
Mostly I think about the woman asleep against me and the word I haven't said yet. The word that's been building since a motel in Albuquerque and a kitchen in Creede and a storage yard in Tucson where I thought the shots were meant for me and my only regret was that I hadn't told her.
Her breathing is slow and even, and her fingers are curled loosely around my forearm where it crosses her stomach, and the casual possession of that grip, the way she holds onto me even in sleep, undoes something I didn't know was still locked.
I'll say it. Soon. When the timing is less about adrenaline and more about choosing her in the quiet, the way she chose me in the chaos.
I close my eyes and let the sound of her breathing pull me toward sleep. The desert outside holds the cemetery and the headstone and the name carved in granite that started all of this. For the first time since that last phone call with Grant, I'm not bracing for what comes next. I'm reaching for it.
19
KENNA
Iwake up in a Las Cruces motel with Colt's arm across my waist and the knowledge that Grant is close, on the hill east of town, waiting.
Yesterday I stood beside Colt at the grave and held his hand while he talked to my brother. I heard every word. The update on Merrick, the evidence holding, Rainey and Flint coming forward. The part about falling for me before he knew who I was. His voice went rough on Grant's name, rougher than usual, and I squeezed his fingers and said nothing because some grief needs a witness, not a response.
This morning I need my own time with him. There are things I need to say to my brother that belong to the two of us.
The cemetery looks different in the early light, softer than it did yesterday. The headstones catch the sunrise, and the mountains behind them are the deep blue-purple of a bruise that's starting to heal. Grant's stone is at the end of the row, the granite cool despite the rising sun, the carved letters sharp-edged under my fingers.
Colt waits by the truck, leaning against the tailgate with his arms crossed. The man learns. Slowly, and with the general grace of a freight train navigating a switchback, but he learns.
I kneel in front of Grant's stone and press my palm flat against the granite. "Hey, big brother."
The words come out thick. I swallow and start again.
"I know Colt told you everything yesterday. The case, the evidence, all of it. You heard him. So I'm not going to repeat the briefing." I trace the curve of the G in his name. "I'm here for the stuff he doesn't know. The stuff that's just ours."
A meadowlark calls from the fence line, bright and clean and completely indifferent to grief. I love it for that.
"I'm sorry I wasn't here. When it happened. I was in my hotel room overseas drinking bad coffee and thinking I had all the time in the world to see you again. I thought we had time." My voice catches, and I let it. Nobody here but Grant and the birds.
"You called me the week before. Asked me to come out to the circuit, said it had been too long since I'd watched you ride. I told you I'd come next month. I told you I was busy. I was always busy, and you were always patient, and now you're here and I'm kneeling in the dirt talking to stone."
The wind picks up. A mesquite tree nearby shakes, dropping a scatter of dry leaves across the grass.
