Page 29 of The Taste of Deceit

“Sarah.”

“I need to tell you the rest.”

“When it was over,” she says, her eyes fixed on the table between us, “he told me if I ever said a word to anybody, he’d kill my parents in their sleep.”

Every muscle in my body locks. That fucking coward. He wasn’t finished after what he’d done to her. He wanted to make sure she carried him home with her. Make sure she never had a safe place to run. She draws a slow breath that sounds like it hurts.

“I believed him.”

Of course she did. She was seventeen.

“I walked back to the house.” Her voice grows quieter, like she’s talking more to herself than to me. “I remember my jeans sticking to my legs. I remember my boots leaving dirt across the kitchen floor because I didn’t even think to take them off.” She blinks once. “I went into the bathroom, turned the shower on, and sat down with all my clothes still on.”

Shit.

“I don’t know how long I was there. I remember crying until the water turned cold.”

I can’t look away from her. Eight fucking years she’s carried this.

“When I couldn’t feel the water anymore, I stood up.” She rubs her palms together absently. “I dried off. I put on clean clothes.” Her lips part, but nothing comes out for a second. “Then I walked into my mama and daddy’s room.”

Something cold settles in my chest.

“Daddy kept a pistol in his bedside table.” She finally looks at me, and there’s nothing in her expression except exhaustion. “He’d shown me where it was years before.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Nobody was home.” Her voice is steady again. Too steady. “They were still at that ranching conference. I opened the drawer, took out the pistol, slipped on my shoes, and walked back outside.”

My hands are numb. I keep staring at hers instead because if I look anywhere else, I’m going to put my fist through the wall.

“The sun was starting to come up.” Her eyes drift somewhere over my shoulder. “Everybody else was already out in the pastures with the cattle. I knew he’d still be in the barn mucking stalls.”

Every sentence is another knife.

“I walked in, and he was kneeling in one of the stalls.” She swallows hard. “I remember hearing the shovel scrape against the floor.” Her voice drops to almost nothing. “He heard me when I got close. He started to turn around.”

Pain shoots into my temples.

“I pulled the trigger.” She pauses. “He fell before he could even finish turning around.”

I drag a hand over my face, but it doesn’t do a damn thing. The rage keeps climbing, hot enough that I can taste it.

“I remember thinking he looked smaller.” She shakes her head once. “I don’t know why I remember that.”

Because trauma remembers everything except the things that make sense.

“The adrenaline…” She lets out a shaky breath. “It was the only reason I could move him.”

I squeeze my eyes shut.

Fuck.

“I dragged him behind an old tractor Daddy hadn’t used in years. It broke down when I was little.” She pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is almost distant. “There was a tarp folded over the seat. I pulled it down and covered him.”

Silence crashes over the kitchen. I can’t think. I can’t breathe.

All I can picture is seventeen-year-old Sarah dragging the body of a thirty-year-old man across a barn by herself while the sun came up over the ranch.