"I don't usually stop for lunch."
"I know.That's why I brought enough for two."She walks to her car and comes back with a cooler.Turkey sandwiches, apple slices, two bottles of water.She hands me one without asking and sits on the tailgate of my truck like she's been eating lunch here for years.
Scout appears from wherever she's been patrolling and lies under the truck in the shade.Koda is back in his run, sleeping.Actually sleeping.In the middle of the day.A dog who's been pacing nonstop for five weeks just curled up and closed his eyes.
I sit next to Lydia on the tailgate.Close enough that our arms almost touch.Close enough that I can see the faint circles under her eyes that her suntan doesn't quite hide.
"You're not sleeping," I say.
She takes a bite of her sandwich.Chews.Swallows."Neither are you."
"How would you know that?"
"Because I got here at six forty-seven and you'd already reorganized your entire scent kit storage system.The labels are color-coded now.That's the work of a man who's been up since long before dawn with nothing to do but keep his hands busy."
I look at her.She looks at me.And something passes between us that I can't label and can't control.A recognition.Two people who don't sleep for different reasons, sitting on a truck tailgate in the Montana sun, eating turkey sandwiches and pretending the proximity isn't doing what it's doing.
"Why'd you really come here?"I ask."Ryan's recommendation and a book contract aren't enough to drag someone three thousand miles to a town they've never heard of."
She sets her sandwich down.Wipes her hands on her leggings.For the first time since I've met her, she doesn't look certain.She looks like a person calculating how much truth to offer and finding the math complicated.
"My parents run a breeding operation in New Hampshire," she says."Puppy mill dressed up as a boutique breeder.Designer dogs, premium prices, deplorable conditions."She pulls one knee up and wraps her arms around it."I've known since I was twelve.I left at eighteen.And now there's a federal investigation, and I've been asked to testify."
"Against your parents."
"Against my parents."She says it flat and clean, but I see the cost of it in the way her fingers grip her knee.White-knuckled.Holding on.
"That's not a small thing."
"No, it's not."She looks at the mountains.The wind moves the braid on her shoulder."I came here because I needed to be somewhere that didn't feel like a courtroom or a kennel.Somewhere I could do the work without drowning in the rest of it."
Drowning.
The word hits the place inside me that still smells like salt water and sounds like screaming.She doesn't know what she just said.She doesn't know that the word drowning is the one that wakes me up at three a.m.with my sheets soaked and my heart trying to break through my ribs.
Or maybe she does.Maybe she reads people the way she reads dogs.Like the answer is always there if you look the right way.
"You'll do it?"I ask."You'll testify."
"I'll do it."No hesitation."Those dogs deserve someone who speaks for them.Even if the people I'm speaking against are the ones who gave me my name."She turns her head and looks at me, and the vulnerability in her face is so raw and open that my hand moves before my brain catches up.
I reach out and tuck the loose strand of hair behind her ear.
My fingers graze the curve of her jaw.Her skin is warm.Impossibly soft.And the sound she makes, a tiny, caught breath, somewhere between surprise and something much more dangerous, goes straight through me.
Her eyes widen.The amber deepens to something molten.She doesn't pull away.She tilts her head a fraction of an inch into my touch, and the movement is so small and so deliberate that my entire body tightens.
I'm leaning in.She's leaning in.Her lips part, and I can feel her breath on my mouth, and her eyes are closing, and every cell in my body is screaming to close the distance, and my phone goes off.
The ringtone is Sawyer's.
I pull back like I've touched a live wire.Lydia blinks.Her chest rises and falls in a quick rhythm that she's trying to control and can't.
I answer the phone without looking at her because if I look at her right now, I'm not going to answer the phone.
"Nelson."
"We've got a situation," Sawyer says."Hiker went off trail near the north fork.Storm's coming in faster than they forecasted.Ryan's mobilizing but he wants your dogs staged at the trailhead within the hour."
