“Yes, ma’am.”
I lock up the kitchen, turn off the lights, and follow her up the stairs. I check on Ethan one more time at the door of his room. He’s curled around ChuChu, breathing slowly, the nightlight throwing soft gold across his cheek. Some of the tension leaks out of me.
In our bedroom, Miranda strips out of her leggings and climbs under the covers in nothing but her T-shirt, and any other night, the sight would have me crossing the room with intent. Tonight I climb in after her, pull her against my chest, and just hold her. My chin settles on top of her head, her good arm rests across my ribs, and her bandaged forearm lies between us with the dressing fresh and clean.
Neither of us speaks for a while.
Then she shifts against me, her voice quiet in the dark. “What were you and Derek talking about?”
I exhale slowly. “Coach.”
“What about him?”
“Derek told me something I didn’t know. Coach is on the short list for the next open seat on the Council.” My thumb moves once against her shoulder. “If that’s true, then the Council would never have come after his family. They want him in that room. They wouldn’t risk it.”
She is quiet, processing. “So what does this mean?”
“The Council of Elderschooses only one nominee. It’s not like there are two or three. Putting Annie in the way of a truck would have been an attack on Coach himself. They wouldn’t have risked losing him.” I’ve spent years believing my sister-in-law was murdered by the Council. And now… “I don’t know what tothink.” My voice has gone low. “If Coach is being measured for a seat, putting his daughter-in-law under a truck is the last move any of them would make.”
Her hand moves up to my chest, fingers spreading flat over my heart. “Then maybe they’re not responsible. Maybe Annie’s death really was what they said it was. An accident.”
A laugh that has no humor in it shakes out of me. “She was on a street that had no business being on her route. Empty road with no cameras, the wrong part of town for a woman who had just walked out of a job interview at a school three miles away. She would never have gone there on her own.”
“Grayson.” Miranda tilts her face up to look at me, and her eyes in the half-light are very steady. “You don’t know what was in her head that day. You don’t know who she was meeting or what she was doing. Maybe she had a reason to be there that nobody knew about. Maybe she made a wrong turn. Maybe somebody offered her a ride.”
I go very still.
“Have you considered,” she continues, quieter still, “that you’ve been chasing an answer for four years because you needed there to be one? Sometimes there isn’t an answer. Sometimes a person is just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and no amount of looking will change that.”
I bury my face in her neck and breathe her in. Soap and laundry detergent twine together with the faint copper trace of her bandage. Underneath them lives the honest smell that’s been part of me since the night I scented her blood in her apartment.
“You might be right,” I whisper into her skin.
She goes quiet, her fingers curling against my chest. “But you don’t believe it yet.”
“I’m trying to.” My voice is muffled against her throat. “Maybe I’ve been wanting an answer so badly that I’ve been seeing a pattern that wasn’t there.”
She turns in my arms until her face is level with mine, and she kisses my chin once, softly and quickly.
“Sometimes there are no answers, Grayson. Sometimes the world is just unfair.”
My heart aches at the words, and I tighten my grip with both arms wrapping around her, holding her against my chest as though the contact alone will keep something at bay.
Her hand stays flat over my heart until she falls asleep.
I lie awake for a long time afterward, watching the ceiling, my fingers stroking the soft skin of her shoulder. If the Council didn’t kill Annie, then someone else did. Or maybe it was a freak accident. Maybe I just need to let this go.
Sighing, I wrap my arms tighter around my mate and close my eyes.
The world is truly unfair.
The weekafter the man at the tree line, I have cameras put in along the fence and the drive, Derek walking the property with me to mark the blind spots. Having him back means I’m not guarding the place alone anymore. The first hearing with the judge is set for a month out. Seven days pass with nothing on the cameras, no scent on the wind, and I let my shoulders come down for the first time since the park.
Miranda has claimed the kitchen table.
She studies there every afternoon now, highlighters lined up, a textbook so thick she has to hold it open with both hands. The certification she’s chasing is some nursing thing I can’t follow a word of, and I’ve quit offering to pay for the course because the third time I tried, she promised to make sure I never fatheranother child. So I help where she allows it. I quiz her from the back of the book and keep her coffee hot.
This afternoon I’m in the doorway with a dish towel over my shoulder, watching something I won’t have the words for later.
