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“I’ve had it for quite a while now,” he said, his voice shaking. “Been… s-savin’ up I guess.”

“Well,” I nodded, honestly considering it. “We can go to the bank tomorrow and see what we’re workin’ with, find some apartments, choose a town we’d like.”

“It’s not in a bank.”

I furrowed my brows. “Where is it then? The apartment?”

He shook his head. “I… I need to show you somethin’.”

Chapter 26

Westley

The pie sat forgotten between me and Rhett, melting into a little pool of vanilla ice cream Dolly must’ve added without me noticing. All I could think was that whatever Rhett needed to show me, it wasn’t going to be anything good. The look on his face told me that much.

“Tonight?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, because the diner had started filling back up with its normal noise again and I didn’t trust it not to carry.

“Tonight,” he said. “After close. I’ll explain everything, I promise. Just... trust me, okay?”

I did trust him. That was never the question. But something in the way he said it, like he was bracing for me to run the second I understood, made my stomach clench uncomfortably.

We finished out the evening quiet, both of us picking at food we didn’t have any appetite for anymore. When Dolly finally flipped the sign on the door to closed, Rhett stood up without a word and jerked his head toward the back of the diner. We both called out a goodnight to Dolly as I followed him past the kitchen, past the big stainless steel fridges still humming along, and out the back door. Rhett led me around the corner of the building to what looked like an entrance to an old tornado shelter under the diner, though the wooden doors were dry rotted almost down to nothing.

“There’s a root cellar,” he said, walking over to the flimsy wooden doors. “Dolly don’t use it. Hasn’t in years, not since they got the walk-in. The stairs are half rotted, anyway.”

“Rhett, what is this?”

He didn’t answer right away, just worked the doors open with hands that weren’t quite steady. He lifted it open and the streetlight spilled onto a set of wooden stairs dropping down into pitch black. Flicking the switch tucked under the ceiling, a bare bulb sputtered to life somewhere below, throwing weak yellow light up the stairwell.

“Just come look,” he said. “Please.”

I followed him down, the air going cool and earthy around us, smelling like dirt and rotting wood and damp. The cellar opened up wider than I expected, shelves lining every wall, and it took my eyes a second to adjust enough to really see what was sitting on them.

There were rodeo buckles, their silver and gold catching what little light there was. Jewelry I’d never seen before, though none of it looked especially spectacular. There was a pair of black shoes with a bright red underside that I’d bet my last dollar were Dolly’s own missing heels. They were sitting right there on a shelf not fifty feet from where she slept every night. There was a handful of cash tucked into a shoebox. And next to it, at least six watches that ranged from dollar store to jewelry counter. There were other things too, in bags or boxes, tucked neatly into the shelves like they’d been stored with love. The root cellar was almost completely full.

My mouth went bone dry. “Rhett.” My voice cracked on the way out. “Rhett, what is all this?”

He stood there in the middle of it all, shoulders curled in on himself, not able to look at me, his eyes glued to the dirt floor.

“It’s mine,” he said. “All of it. I took it. All of it, West. Every single piece.”

“You… took it?” I shook my head, unwilling to believe what it sounded like. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I took it,” he said again, louder this time, like saying it twice would make it easier to swallow. “Off clotheslines, out of trucks, through unlocked windows when folks were at church or out at the feed store. I been doin’ it for months now, West. Since before you and me ever happened. Since before the tornado, even.”

I stood there staring at him, at the shelves full of other people’s things stacked up neat as a general store, and felt something cold settle into my chest. “The Sagebrush thief,” I said slowly, the pieces clicking together one after another, ugly and undeniable. “That’s you. That’s been you this whole time.”

“Yeah.”

“Marcus is lookin’ for you,” I said, my voice climbing even though some distant part of my brain was telling me to keep it down, that sound carried in a cellar like this. “He’s been tearin’ his hair out for months tryin’ to figure out who’s doin’ this, and you’ve been sittin’ right there in his office for the past two weeks, pretendin’ you don’t know a damn thing.”

“I know.” Rhett finally looked up at me, and his eyes were wet and bloodshot, like he knew this moment had been coming, like he knew how I’d react. “I know how it looks. I know what it makes me.”

“Why?” The word came out rougher than I meant it to. “Rhett, why would you do this? You coulda got caught. You coulda gone to jail. You still could.” I paused. “You… You stole from Dolly… How can you justify that?”

“Because I needed the money to leave,” he said, and now it was spilling out of him fast, like a dam finally giving way. “Because nobody in this town ever made me feel like I belonged. Not really, not after my parents died and I had to depend on everyone’s charity to keep me alive. Everyone at that ranch treated me like shit and nobody in town would hardly even look at me. I needed a way out, West, and I didn’t have one, so I made one.”

“By stealin’ from Dolly?” My voice cracked on her name, thinking of her bringing us pie not an hour ago. I thought of how she stood between me and my daddy with a butcher’s knife like she’d do anything to keep us safe. “She took you in. She’s fed you and gave you a place to live until you came to the ranch. And she’s takin’ care of us both now. How could you do that to her?”