Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Milo

He was right, and I hated it. I sat on an upturned bucket inside the warehouse and looked at the shelves. Even with the trailer full and the truck bed loaded to the top, more than half of everything he had was still sitting here. Wool blankets. Rope. Tools. Water filters. Three more pallets of propane tanks by the back wall. All of it worth more than gold in three months.

It would take him four trips, at least. Maybe five. And the freeze would not wait for a fifth trip.

Rhett went around the far side of the trailer to tighten the straps, and for a minute I couldn't see him and he couldn't see me.

I got up and walked to the back wall. I put my hand on the nearest pallet of propane tanks, twelve of them shrink-wrapped together, and I touched the ring with my thumb.

The pallet disappeared.

There was a hollow square on the concrete where it had been, a clean shape in the dust. I could see it in the gray room now, sitting beside the generator I had bought yesterday. My heart was slamming. I reached for the second pallet.

"Milo?"

I pulled my hand back so fast I hit my elbow on the shelf.

Rhett was standing at the end of the aisle with a ratchet strap hanging from his hand. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the clean square on the floor where the pallet had been.

"I could have sworn there were three of those," he said slowly.

"There were two," I said. "I counted when we came in."

He looked at the dust on the floor. Then he looked at me. I made myself hold his eyes. I had lied to my family my whole life about small things, about being fine, about not being hungry, about not minding when Owen took my room, and I had gotten very good at it. Lying to Rhett felt like swallowing glass.

"Huh," he said finally. "I must be more tired than I thought."

He went back to the trailer. I stood there with my elbow throbbing and my face hot, and I knew he didn't believe me. He had decided not to push, the same way he hadn't pushed last night about the ring, and somehow that was worse than if he had grabbed my hand and demanded the truth.

I would tell him. Soon. Before he had to stop pretending he hadn't seen.

We worked through lunch. Rhett called a man he knew from the VFW who owned a second trailer and arranged to borrow it in the morning. At three o'clock, I walked out with the last box of first aid kits, and Rhett was standing by the truck holding a thermos. He poured me a cup of coffee and pushed it into my hands.

"You did good today," he said.

"I carried boxes."

"You carried boxes for six hours on four hours of sleep while your family tried to steal your money out from under you." He leaned back against the truck beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. "Most people would have sat in a corner and cried."

"I cried enough in my last..." I stopped. "In my life. I'm done with that."

If he noticed what I almost said, he didn't show it. He looked out at the road, at the bare trees along the fence line, at the sky that was already starting to go white in the west.

"When we get up there," he said, "and things settle, I'm going to find my brother. I don't know how yet. But I'm going to find him, and I'm going to find out what happened to my dad." He turned his head. "I want you to know that now. So you're not surprised when I go."

"You're not going alone."

"Milo."

"You're not going alone," I said again.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached over and brushed his thumb across the bandage on my chin, very lightly, the way he had last night, and his mouth tipped up at one corner.

"Stubborn," he said.

"You're one to talk."

He laughed, and I felt it through his shoulder.

That was when I heard the car.

It came up Route 9 slowly, a long black SUV with tinted windows, the expensive kind I had only ever seen outside the hotel downtown. It slowed at the end of the gravel lot and turned in. It rolled toward us and stopped about twenty feet away, the engine still running, exhaust curling white in the cold.

Rhett pushed off the truck and stepped in front of me without a word.

The back door opened, and a man got out. He was younger than I expected, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight, tall and slim, with dark blond hair swept back off his forehead and the kind of tan you get on a ski slope. He wore a charcoal wool coat that probably cost more than Rhett's truck, and leather gloves, and he walked across the gravel as if he owned it.

He stopped a few feet from Rhett and smiled.

"Mr. Gallagher," he said. "I was very sorry about your father. He was a brilliant man." His eyes moved past Rhett's shoulder and found me, and the smile changed, warmed, the way someone smiles at a thing they have wanted for a long time. "And you must be Milo Bennett."

"Who are you?" I asked, though some part of me already knew.

"Sawyer Prescott." He pulled off one glove and held out his hand to me, past Rhett, as if Rhett weren't standing there at all. "I've read your barley paper eleven times. I've been looking for you for months."