He sighed and stood.
“Grab me a bottle while you’re up,” Vince said. “Looks like I’m drinking for everybody.” And given that it was noon on a Thursday, he’d told his bosses at the quarry to go fuck themselves. Certainly not the first time.
Casey fetched him the beer, then headed up to check on Abilene’s progress. He knocked softly on the door.
“Come in.”
He found the room nearly stripped. The bed where they’d come together was bare to the mattress, the bedding rolled up in a tangle at its foot. “Wow, that was quick.”
She smiled and shrugged. “I never had much to begin with. Was that the news you guys were watching?” He’d filled her in on the previous morning’s events yesterday afternoon.
“Yeah. Bean died of shock in the back of the ambulance. From the drugs as much as anything, it sounds like. Not from Miah shooting him.” And it seemed the man had spilled enough to implicate himself before he’d gone under for good, if not to name any of his alleged bosses. “If anything, Miah’s going to wind up a folk hero,” Casey said. “People around here loved his dad, and they love justice.”
“I guess that’s something. That he won’t be in trouble, I mean.”
“It’s a lot. Last thing the ranch can handle right now is to lose two of its owners.”
Christ knew poor Christine was in no shape to handle it all on her own. Some of her family had arrived from out of state, at least—two sisters and one of their husbands. They were downstairs now, cooking and handling the endless incoming calls with stern efficiency. The phone seemed to ring ten times an hour, but never with any insight into who’d wanted Miah dead, or why.
Abilene didn’t ask Casey anything more about the news, and he didn’t blame her. Everyone had information overload, and that combined with the grieving was enough to fatigue anybody. It reminded him way too much of the aftermath that had followed Vince’s exposure of the now-late Sheriff Tremblay’s involvement in Alex’s death.
“Can I help with anything?” Casey asked.
“You could break down the crib,” Abilene offered. “If you can find the right screwdriver.” She paused, gaze catching on his left hand, its first fingers wrapped in a bandage. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing, just a little nick.” Just a nasty little flesh wound from a pair of wire cutters, from when he’d been furiously snipping his old cell phone’s SIM card into tiny slivers that morning. He’d lost himself in a frantic fit of anger, and his finger had paid the price. The rest of the phone had met its maker courtesy of a hammer, and he’d enjoyed every seething, righteous moment of it. He knew what that phone had been, with hindsight—an escape hatch. He’d hung on to Emily’s number, kept himself accessible in case he ever needed an out, an exit ramp straight back to easy street for when the going got tough around here. In the wake of Don’s death, he hated what that phone represented. He hated himself for having hung on to it for so long, and had felt better once those plastic shards had disappeared into their shallow grave . . . if only a little.
He held up his hand, pressing his finger and thumb together and pretending the pain didn’t scream like an unholy bitch. “It’s nothing, plus I’m right-handed. I can handle the crib.” Anything for you. Anything she needed, anything she asked for. As for himself, he’d never needed to collapse into somebody’s arms as badly as he did hers, right now. Except he couldn’t. And he knew better than to even wish it.
He wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t going to play the same part he had since the fall, Mr. Useful, Mr. Reliable, and expect that, given time, she’d get over his past. Because it hadn’t been completely in his past, just like she’d called it. He’d been considering that last job. He squeezed his hand into a fist, just to make his finger shriek.
He carried the bedclothes down and left them on the washing machine, found a couple screwdrivers in the Churches’ junk drawer.
“Success,” he told Abilene when he joined her back in the room.
She smiled politely, checking the caps on her toiletry bottles before tossing them in a suitcase. Something flashed at her throat.
The cross, he realized, taken aback.
“You’re wearing it,” he blurted.
She blushed and put her hand to the pendant, nodded.
“I wasn’t sure if you would.”
“I wasn’t, either. But these last few days . . . Let’s just say I’ve needed it, more than ever.” She pressed it to her skin with her fingertips, like a tiny prayer, maybe. “Thanks.”
He nodded and decided to let it rest at that. It was too dangerous to read anything into it. Dangerously hopeful.
The baby was in the crib, and she stared up at Casey with those wide blue eyes. Then she smiled at him. He smiled back, remembering the couple weeks before she could do that, back when he and Abilene had debated every little expression on her face. Happy or gassy? He straightened to look at Abilene.
“Okay if I take her out?”
She laughed, the sound like bells, cheering him some. “I didn’t expect you to take it apart with her still in there.”
“No, I just . . . I wasn’t sure if you wanted me doing that now. Touching her or whatever. I know when I’m babysitting, it’s different, I didn’t want to assume. Or seem too familiar, I guess.”
Her smile faded and her brows drew together, unmistakable hurt. She crossed the floor to stand beside him by the crib. She spoke to him but looked at her daughter.
“Of course you can still touch her. I don’t hate you, Casey. I just can’t be with you, how we were. You do understand why, don’t you?”
“Yeah, of course.” And better now than ever, after everything that had happened.
She sighed, shoulders looking heavy. Finally she straightened and met his eyes with those startling ones. “I promised myself when I found out I was pregnant, I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes I had been. One of those mistakes was falling for the wrong guys, again and again. And believe me when I tell you, you’re wonderful. You’ve treated me better than any other guy I’ve been with, and you’re way nicer than any of them. Better in every way. But you’re still . . . The things you did, and that you were thinking of still doing. It’s illegal, and it’s dangerous. For you and for other people. I can’t let that kind of thing slide anymore.”
“I’m never taking another one of those jobs ever again,” he said.
She looked away, shaking her head. “I want to believe that. But even if I knew it was a hundred percent true . . .”
He nodded. “You don’t need to explain.” Never had he been so crystal clear on his own shortcomings, and how they must seem to an outsider. He’d had to fill Miah in some, to explain why he’d been poking around in the ruined barn to begin with when he’d found the lighter. It had curdled his guts to spill it all, knowing that the man had just lost his father to arson. Miah had taken it in stride, but Casey had felt dirty, deep down in his heart. Ashamed.
But it was too late for those feelings now, where Abilene was concerned. He’d had his chance to say the right things—to feel the right way about his own past—and he’d fucked it, thoroughly.
He half wished he was doomed to lose his mind, now and then. It seemed like the only thing that might spare him suffering the burden of this regret for the rest of his life.
Chapter 29
You don’t need to explain. Those words echoed in Abilene’s head as she got the baby into her sling and hefted her bag.
If only I could. She knew she couldn’t be with him. She’d known it with perfect clarity just a few days earlier, but her sense of the reasons was growing fuzzy. Catastrophes had a way of putting things in perspective, of making minor horrors seem less atrocious by comparison. She couldn’t be with him because . . . because . . .