Her sedan is packed to the brim and that sweet little baby is clipped into the backseat. Cece has dark circles etched under her eyes and she’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Just like that, I know.
I want to be careful about that sentence because I am not a man who knows things based on twelve minutes in a general store. I am a man who watches, files, waits for the second and third data points before I commit to a pattern. In my line of work, knowing too fast gets people hurt.
But I know.
I pull out onto the road and slow until she follows. There’s no way I want her taking these roads alone.
I have wanted a family since I was eight years old. I'm the youngest of four and my siblings were all old enough when I came along that I basically grew up in an empty house.
By the time I was in high school my brothers and sister were scattered across three states with their own kids and their own lives. My parents were tired in the way parents get tired at the end of a long run and I can’t blame them for it. They did their best.
But I ate a lot of dinners alone. I watched a lot of sitcoms about loud families and wondered what that was like. Then Mom got sick my junior year of college and Dad followed her two years later. I learned what alone actually was, which turned out to be different from what I'd been practicing.
I've been practicing alone my whole life and I'm done with it. I've been done with it for a while. I was already looking when I came to Iron Peak because this is the kind of town where a man puts roots down on purpose.
The quiet work, the good people and the long morning patrols add up to a life that could be worth something if you had someone to come home to. But I didn't have someone to come home to.
Until twelve minutes ago.
CHAPTER 3
CECE
I followhis taillights up the canyon.
That's not a metaphor. That's a literal fact of what is happening right now. I am following the taillights of a man I met forty minutes ago up a narrow, unlit, switchback mountain road in the dark because he offered and I said yes.
This is how the women die in every true crime podcast I’ve ever listened to. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m not even scared.
I should be. My nervous system has been running on scared for so long it basically renders it scared by default. Scared is the resting state. Scared is what I was in the parking lot of every rest stop. Scared is what got me out the door of the house I spent six years in and into this packed-up car with my daughter and everything I could fit.
But I am not scared right now. I am driving down a canyon road behind a deputy's cruiser and my hands are at ten and two and my whole chest is doing something loose and warm that I don’t even recognize.
I’m losing my edge. I know it.
I glance at Birdie in the rearview. Still out. Cheeks pink from the car seat straps, mouth slightly open. She looks like her dadright now. The best parts of him only. That’s all it takes for me to think about Greg, even though I don’t want to. I try to push them away, but the thoughts come anyway, and somehow that’s right on brand for Greg.
Greg never once did anything for me without making me feel like I owed him. He never opened a door for me. Greg never walked on the street side of the sidewalk or offered me his jacket or put his hand on the small of my back to guide me through a crowded room. Greg thought chivalry was a performance other men did to make him look bad. He said so out loud, often, but of course only when it was just the two of us.
I did everything for six years. A part of me thought things would change when Birdie came along, but that wasn’t the case. I was the one who got up at two in the morning when Birdie had a fever. I was the one who booked the pediatrician and remembered the vaccines and packed the diaper bag and stocked the freezer with meals for the weeks Greg wastoo busyto deal with dinner.
And the money.God,the money.
I was the one who handled the finances, right up until I wasn't… Right up until the week before the divorce papers were finalized when I logged into our joint account and found it empty, down to nineteen dollars. Greg told me over the phone it was his right.
It wasn't.
We both knew it wasn't. But by the time I had a lawyer who could prove it, I had already decided the price of fighting for the money was the price of staying in that town. The price of staying in that town was higher than the money.
So I packed the car. I took what I could get. I drove a million miles until a deputy named Ryan bought my daughter's diapers in a general store at the bottom of a canyon like it was nothing.
My eyes sting and I blink it back.
Get it together, Cece. He paid for diapers. That's all it was. He paid for diapers and offered you a police escort and told you he had you which is a thing cops are trained to say and also a thing that is probably in his job description. He wasn't on duty when he paid. He was in uniform but he used his own cash.
“Ugh!” I slap a hand to the steering wheel.
