Mr. Calloway shifted his weight. His jaw tightened the way men's jaws tightened when they were deciding between the truth and something more convenient.
"Your daddy called me years ago," he said. "Said if his daughter ever turned up in Larkspur, to let him know." He cleared his throat. "Had a feelin' you'd end up here someday."
"So you did." My voice was flat. Steady. "You picked up the phone and told a man—a man you didn't know a goddamn thing about—exactly where to find me."
"He's your father, Calvin. He had a right to?—"
"He had no right." John's voice cut through like a blade on a whetstone. The old man had gone rigid beside me, every line of his body pulled taut with a fury that had burned slow for longer than I'd been alive. "That man never had a right to a damn thing where my granddaughter is concerned. You know what kind of man Denny Jennings is? Do you?"
Mr. Calloway opened his mouth.
"He's the kind of man who took a twelve-year-old girl who'd just lost her mother and dragged her across the country behind a rodeo circuit because she was useful to him." John's voice was shaking now—not with weakness, but with frustration. He'd spent twenty-two years in a facility with nothing but time and regret and the quiet, gnawing knowledge that he'd failed the people who needed him most. "And you handed her right back to him."
The yard was dead quiet. A horse nickered softly from somewhere in the barn. The sun was starting its initial descent, throwing long shadows across the gravel, and nobody moved.
Mr. Calloway's face had turned a sickening shade of gray. "I didn't know all that. He said he just wanted to know she was safe?—"
"Don't." Rhett's voice was low and dangerous in a way I'd only heard once before—the day Brody had gotten in his face about Sassy. But this was different. This was directed at his own father, and it carried the weight of a lifetime of things Rhett had swallowed and was no longer willing to keep down. "Don't stand there and act like you did this girl a favor."
"Rhett—"
"You had a woman workin' on your ranch—my ranch—and you knew who she was the whole goddamn time. Knew her family owned this land before you ever set foot on it. And instead of sayin' a word to me, to her, to anyone, you picked up the phone and called the one person she'd spent half her life runnin' from."
Mr. Calloway's mouth was a thin, hard line. "I didn't know she was runnin'—"
"You didn't ask." Rhett took a step forward. His voice hadn't risen, and somehow that was worse. "That's the thing with you. You never fuckin' ask. You just decide what's right and do it and let everybody else deal with the wreckage." His chest was heaving now, the stoic mask cracking at the edges. "Elena. Mom. And now this."
The name hung in the air—Elena, the sister Mr. Calloway had kept from Rhett, the secret that had already blown this family apart once.
Mr. Calloway flinched. Actually flinched.
"You're a miserable piece of shit," Rhett said, quiet and steady and final. "And I'm done makin' excuses for you."
He turned to me. The anger was still there, but underneath it—directed at me now—was something rawer. Guilt, maybe. Or shame that this had happened on his land, under his watch, by his father's hand.
"Calvin, I'm sorry." His voice cracked on the second word, just barely, and he cleared his throat like it hadn't happened. "If I'd known?—"
"But you didn't." I met his eyes and held them.
Rhett nodded once. Looked at the ground. Looked back up. Then he turned and walked toward the barn without another word, his shoulders set in that rigid line that meant he was holding himself together by force of will and not much else.
Mr. Calloway, coward that he was, scurried back to the house. The screen door slammed behind him.
Brody's hand found mine. Squeezed once.
I squeezed back.
"Well, that was a hoot," he said, always the first to break the tension so the rest of the world could relax a little.
John let out a long, slow breath beside me. When I looked over, his eyes were wet, but his jaw was set—stubborn and proud and aching in a way that made my chest hurt.
"You alright?" I asked.
He sniffed. Rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "I'll be alright when I stop wantin' to put my boot through that man's front teeth."
Hank, who had been standing silently through the entire exchange with the stoic disinterest of a man who'd seen everything twice, shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth.
"I'll hold him down for ya, John."
