Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Rhett

"Not like that." I could feel my face getting hot, which hadn't happened since I was about sixteen. "Your brother just drove off from my lot knowing exactly where you are, and I don't like the way he looked at you. The motel's got a lock a kid could open with a credit card. You take the cot. I'll take the floor. I've slept on worse."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

He looked at the cot, then at me. "You don't have to sleep on the floor."

My heart did something stupid.

I stood up and went to the stove and put another log in, mostly so I'd have something to do with my hands. When I turned back around, he had gotten up too, and he was standing a foot away from me, close enough that I could see the stove light on his face.

"I meant what I said," he said. "About the kiss. I'm not sorry."

"Good." My voice came out rough. "I'm not either."

He reached up and pressed the loose corner of the bandage back down against his chin, and his fingers were trembling a little. I caught his hand and held it, and then I kissed him again, slower this time, without the shock of the first one. He made a quiet sound and leaned into me, and I backed him up a step until his legs hit the edge of the cot. His hands slid up under the hem of my flannel shirt and spread flat against my stomach, cold from the wind, and I flinched and he laughed into my mouth.

"Sorry," he whispered.

"Don't be."

We went down onto the cot together, awkward, too big for it, the frame creaking under us. I braced my arm beside his head and kissed his jaw, his throat, the place under his ear that made him catch his breath and grip my shoulders. He was warm everywhere now. He pulled me down against him, and for a long moment there was nothing else in the world, just the heat of him and the sound of the wind and his heart racing under my hand.

Then I stopped.

I rested my forehead against his and made myself breathe. He looked up at me, flushed, confused.

"Not tonight," I said quietly. "Not with your brother's voice still in this room. Not when you're scared and I'm angry. When it happens, I want it to be because it's the only thing either of us is thinking about."

He stared at me for a long moment. Then something in his face softened in a way I had never seen, as if nobody had ever told him he was worth waiting for.

"Okay," he said.

I kissed his forehead and lay down beside him on my side, squeezed against the wall, and pulled the army blanket over both of us. He curled toward me without seeming to think about it, his head tucked under my chin, and within ten minutes his breathing went slow and even.

I didn't sleep.

I lay there with my arm over him and listened to the wind, and I thought about my father sitting in his car in his own driveway with his hand on his chest. I thought about the entry in the notebook, the torn paper where his pen had gone through. He told Prescott he was going to the governor on Monday. Prescott smiled. And four days later my father was dead.

Around two in the morning, I eased out from under the blanket without waking Milo and pulled another box off the stack. Dad, office. I sat at the table with a flashlight and went through the notebooks one by one, the ones I had skipped because they were full of numbers. This time I read every line.

Most of it was what I expected. Wind speeds, ocean temperatures, ice readings off satellites. Then, near the end of the second-to-last notebook, another short entry, the handwriting tight and angry.

The son came back alone today. Sawyer. He's nothing like his father, or he pretends not to be. He asked about the barley paper from Westbrook, the Bennett kid. Wanted to know where the boy lived, whether he had family, whether he could be bought. I told him to get out of my house.

I read it until the words stopped making sense. Then I looked over at the cot, at Milo asleep with his hand tucked under his cheek and his ring catching the last orange light from the stove.

They had known about him for months. Before me, before Owen, before any of this.

I put the notebook down and pulled out the one thing in that box that wasn't my father's. It was a framed picture from the Fourth of July three years ago. Dad was in the middle with his arms around both of us, me on one side, and Cal on the other, grinning, with his blond hair sticking up in every direction and a faded white scar on his chin from some accident when he was little that he never remembered. Cal had come to us when he was nine, after the people who adopted him died in a car crash on the interstate. He had been the quietest kid I had ever met. He was twenty now, and he talked more than anyone I knew.

Or he used to.

In March, he took a job as a maintenance tech for Prescott Holdings at some new facility out in the mountains, and when I asked him why a kid who could barely fix a toaster wanted to work for the company that bought our father's life's work, he told me it was good money and I should mind my own business. We fought. I said things I shouldn't have said. He called every Sunday anyway, all spring and summer, until the second week of September. Then he stopped. I had called him forty-one times since. Every call went straight to voicemail.

I sat with the picture until the window started going gray.

My phone buzzed on the table.

I almost didn't look. It was five in the morning, and nobody called me at five in the morning except wrong numbers and the alarm company. Then I saw the name on the screen, and I knocked my chair over standing up.

Cal.

It was a text, not a call. I read it standing there in the cold with my hands shaking.

Rhett, I'm sorry. I can't call, they check everything. Don't let anyone take the Northfield station. They know about the Bennett kid and they want him. Delete this.

Before I could even start typing, a second message came through.

Dad didn't have a heart attack. I can prove it.

I called him. It rang once and went to voicemail. I called again, and this time it didn't ring at all. A recorded voice told me the number I had dialed was no longer in service.

Behind me, the cot creaked. I turned around, and Milo was sitting up with the blanket around his shoulders, his eyes on my face.

"Rhett," he said. "What happened?"