But somewhere deep inside me wasn’t going to believe it was truly true until I saw my babies were safe with my own eyes.
Lachlan had come by yesterday. He’d sat in the chair where Logan was now, his badge clipped to his belt, a notebook open on his knee, and asked for my statement. I gave him everything Carter had confessed in that car.
The grants he’d killed, the mortgage he’d bought through Pinnacle, the letters, the payments, the acceleration clause. I told him about the fire, the device on Carter’s phone, the accessroad. I answered every question as clearly as I could manage through the fog of painkillers and concussion.
Carter was currently under arrest. No doubt his family would get him the best lawyers money could buy. He would deny everything he said to me in that car, but Lachlan said it didn’t matter. There would still be a paper trail Carter couldn’t hide.
The problem with a paper trail was that it could take quite a while to unravel it all.
Which meant Pawsitive was still in deep financial trouble.
“Isaac’s loan covers the acceleration clause,” I said, picking up a conversation we’d been circling for close to an hour. “That’s still got to be paid even though Carter was behind it. He technically didn’t do anything illegal there. Even getting my grants pulled wasn’t illegal.”
Logan looked up from his phone, once again patient even though we’d covered this topic multiple times too. “You’ll get more grants. We’ll apply immediately. Without that asshole making sure they don’t go through, there’s no reason to think you won’t get them like you have in the past.”
“I know. Eventually.” I shifted against the pillows and winced when my ribs reminded me they existed. “But eventually doesn’t pay for a barn that isn’t standing anymore.”
He put his phone completely away and took my hand.
“Without the barn, there are no training sessions,” I said. “No placements, no therapy programs, no birthday parties. Everything we built to generate income is now gone.” I picked at the tape on my IV line because my hands needed something to do and the hospital hadn’t provided a clipboard. “I’m not spiraling. I’m just looking at all the angles.”
“I know you’re not spiraling.”
“I am a little bit spiraling.”
“I know that too.” He leaned forward in the chair and rested his forearms on the mattress. “We’ll figure it out.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
I looked at him. The stubble on his jaw had gone past the point of deliberate and into the territory of a man who hadn’t left a hospital room long enough to shave. There were circles under his eyes. His shirt was wrinkled in a way that would have driven the military-neat version of Logan Stroud to iron it on principle.
He looked like he hadn’t slept in three days, because he probably hadn’t. He’d been in that chair, or close to it, since I woke up.
“I love you,” I said.
I’d wanted to say it the night everything fell apart. I’d typed everything else in that text but held this back because I wanted to say it to his face. My face was purple now and my arm had an IV in it, and it was still the right time.
“I love you, Logan. I should have said it before.”
His fingers squeezed mine on the mattress. He turned my hand over and pressed his thumb into my palm, and the roughness of his skin against the raw place where the zip ties had been should have hurt but didn’t.
“I love you too, little bird.” He said it steady and plain, no extra words around it. “That’s not changing. And I’m not going anywhere.”
I looked at the ceiling and blinked hard. I was not going to cry in this hospital room.
“You know what the worst part of being in here is?” I said, after a minute.
“The IV you won’t stop complaining about?”
“Besides the IV.” I rubbed my thumb across his knuckles. “Nobody came to visit me.”
The words hung between us. I heard them land and wished I could pull them back, because they sounded smaller out loud than they had inside my head.
“Lachlan came, but that was for my statement.” I kept my voice light and practiced. “I know people are taking care of the animals. The whole town is helping, and I appreciate it so much. I would never expect anyone to sit in a hospital room when there are sixty displaced animals that need managing.”
Logan was watching me, and I kept going because stopping meant sitting in the silence of what I’d just admitted.
