Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Rhett

"Get off my step," I said.

Trent didn't move right away. He stood there with his hood up and his hands in his pockets, looking past my shoulder at his brother, and he smiled like a man who had just thrown a match into a dry field and wanted to stay and watch it catch.

"He told you to ask," Trent said to Milo. "Don't forget."

I shut the door in his face.

I stood with my hand flat against it and listened to his boots crunch across the gravel, the car door slam, the engine turn over. His headlights swept across the window one more time, across the boxes with my father's handwriting on them, and then they were gone, and there was only the wind pushing at the walls and the stove ticking behind me.

I didn't turn around right away. I needed a second.

How many men he's killed. And what he did with their bodies.

Nobody in this town knew about that. Nobody in this state knew, except one man, and we had buried him in April.

When I finally turned, Milo was standing by the table where I had left him. His hair was still messed up from my hand, and the little bandage on his chin had come loose at one corner. He wasn't backing toward the door. He wasn't reaching for his keys. He was just watching me with those dark, steady eyes, and somehow that was harder to face than if he had run.

"Sit down," I said. "Please. I'll tell you."

He sat. I pulled my chair back around to my side of the table, because I didn't trust myself to be close to him while I said it, and I sat with my elbows on my knees and looked at the floor between my boots.

"I flew rescue for the Army for six years," I said. "Medevac. Mostly we picked up wounded and got them to a hospital before they bled out. That's what I was good at. Getting in fast and getting out faster."

He didn't say anything. I kept going.

"Eight years ago, we went down. Took fire on the way out of a valley with three wounded on board, and the tail rotor went, and we came down hard on a hillside. My crew chief broke both legs. My co-pilot was unconscious. Two men came up the hill toward the wreck before our backup could reach us, and they weren't coming to help." I opened and closed my right hand. The burn scar on my forearm pulled tight the way it always did when I thought about that day. "I had a rifle and I had my crew behind me, and I didn't let them get any closer. That's the answer to your brother's question. Two."

The stove popped. Milo was so quiet I could hear him breathing.

"There was a review afterward," I said. "Closed. It cleared me, and the record was sealed. I got out the next year. I never told my brother Cal. I never told anybody except my father, one night when I was drunk and couldn't sleep, and he never said a word about it to anyone. I'd bet my life on that."

"And the bodies?" Milo asked quietly.

"Nothing." I looked up at him. "I didn't do anything with them. I left them where they fell, and I dragged my crew chief back to the tail section and kept pressure on his leg until the second bird came over the ridge at dawn. The Army handled the rest. I never even saw their faces up close."

I waited for it, for the moment when he looked at me the way people look at a dog that has bitten someone. My ex had looked at me like that once, when I woke up shouting in the middle of the night and didn't know where I was. She had moved out a month later.

Milo didn't look at me like that. He looked at me as if I had just told him something he had been waiting to hear.

"You saved your crew," he said.

"I killed two men."

"To save four." He leaned forward over the table. "Rhett, you could have run down that hill. You stayed with them."

I didn't know what to say to that. Nobody had ever put it that simply, not even the review board, not even my father. I rubbed my hands over my face and breathed out hard.

"That's not the part that bothers me," I said finally. "The part that bothers me is that your brother knew. A twenty-year-old kid who's lived in Tulsa his whole life, who never met me before this morning, knew about a sealed Army review that happened when he was twelve. He knew the number. He knew enough to make it sound like I've got a basement full of graves." I shook my head. "That's not a guess. Somebody told him, or he found it somewhere, and I can't think of one way he could have done either."

Milo looked down at the table. His right hand went over his left, the way it had in the truck, the way it had at the mall when his father came at him. Covering it.

"He's wrong about you," he said. His voice was low, almost to himself. "He's wrong about which one of you is dangerous."

There was something in the way he said it. Not like a guess, or a hope. Like a thing he already knew for a fact.

"Milo," I said. "What's he talking about with the ring?"

His fingers tightened over his hand.

"It was my grandmother's," he said.

"That's not what I asked."

"I know." He looked up at me, and there was something in his face I couldn't read, something old and tired that didn't belong on a twenty-three-year-old. "I can't tell you yet. Not because I don't trust you. Because I don't know how to say it without you thinking I've lost my mind."

"I've got a dead father who said the sky was going to freeze, and a box of notebooks that say he was right." I almost smiled. "My bar for losing your mind is pretty low."

That got a small laugh out of him, the same shaky, surprised sound he had made against my mouth twenty minutes ago, and something in my chest went loose and warm at the sound of it.

I let it go. Whatever it was, he would tell me when he was ready, and I wasn't going to drag it out of him the way his family dragged everything else.

"Stay here tonight," I said.

He blinked surprised.