Page 111 of Wreckage and Rain

"I'm okay."

"You want to go now."

"After you file."

"After I file."

"Alone."

He's quiet. Then: "Alone."

"I love you for what you're about to not say."

"I was about to say a lot of things."

"Don't."

"I'm not going to say any of them."

He doesn't. He just looks straight out the windshield at the dark and lets the not-saying be what he gives me.

I park in front of the B&B. We sit in the dark cab of the SUV with the engine ticking. Colt reaches across the console and takes my hand, brings it to his mouth, kisses the inside of my wrist.

"Two rooms," he says.

"Two rooms tonight."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

He gets out. I get out. We walk up the porch steps together. Lorna is asleep at the desk with the radio low. We climb the stairs side by side. He unlocks his door. I unlock mine.

In the hallway, before I close my door, I turn back.

"Colt."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for tonight."

"For what."

"For letting them have you."

He looks at me across the narrow hall, with the haint-blue ceiling light buzzing softly above us, and he says, "It was the easiest hard thing I've done in a long time."

I close the door.

I sit on the edge of the bed in the city that almost killed me, and I feel, for the first time in too long, the warmth of being home.

Chapter 33: Takedown

Colt

The room is still dark when I open the laptop. I'm in a wingback chair with a cup of Lorna's lobby coffee going cold beside me and a vase of camellias on the writing desk. I'm about to dismantle my father's life from a yellow room in a B&B.

Dade's first email comes in a few minutes later.