Page 38 of Reluctant Bride

Two lies. Maybe three. I’ve known this woman long enough to count them without trying, just like I did at twenty-four, right before I learned what she was capable of when it mattered most.

I don’t push a third question. I let her walk back toward the fire chief instead, blazer ruined, composure reassembling itself with every step, and I stand there in the street with smoke stinging my eyes and an old wound sitting where it’s always sat, undisturbed, unexplained, and very much still armed.

Sage is waiting when I get back to her, arms crossed, watching my face with patience and skepticism.

“You’re going to tell me what that was,” she says. She isn’t asking this time.

I could give her the same half-answer I gave her on the porch this morning, the unannounced visitors line. True and not the whole truth. Some old, well-worn habit reaching for the easy exit before I even decide to take it.

I don’t give it.

“Everything,” I say instead. “Every question I asked her and every answer she gave me, including the parts where I know she lied. You get to decide what we do with it. Not me deciding for you and telling you after. That’s the deal.”

Her eyes change, wary and unguarded at once, like she wasn’t expecting me to uphold the clause she wrote into our contract five days ago.

“Okay,” she says, quieter than the street around us has any right to allow. “Start talking.”

She’s close enough now that I catch the smoke still clinging to her hair under the soap from this morning, close enough that some reckless, off-duty part of me wants to close the last foot of space and forget there’s a burned building at my back. I don’t. I want her mouth for reasons that have nothing to do with the fire, and every reason not to prove it in the middle of Main Street with half of Rimrock watching.

I don’t get the chance either way.

Mackenzie finds us at the edge of the barricade tape, soot streaked across one cheekbone, federal badge out and flashed at a deputy who clearly already knows who Holt Blackwater’s girlfriend is and doesn’t need convincing twice. Voice pitched under the noise so that only the two of us catch it over the noise of the last hose line finally choking out.

“The files that burned.” She doesn’t waste time on a greeting. “Basement archive, land and survey records, the whole 1962 section gone before anyone got a hose on it.”

“Ashley knew more than she’s saying,” I tell her. “I’d bet the ranch on it.”

“Maybe.” Mackenzie’s eyes cut to Sage, then back to me, and whatever she’s about to say, I can already feel uneasiness before she says it. “I pulled the building’s access logs on the drive over. Somebody requested the full basement inventory nine days ago. Name, badge number, timestamp, all of it.”

“Who?”

She doesn’t make me wait for it, which is somehow worse than if she had.

“Cruz.”

THIRTEEN

SAGE

By noon, half of Rimrock has paid five dollars a throw to launch Knox into a dunk tank, and Ashley is running the line like she invented joy.

Crews worked frantically all morning hauling scorched debris out of the records office two streets over, and Nell’s has been running coffee to soot-streaked volunteers, but the fairgrounds sit clean on the far side of the town square, close enough that the clocktower’s still visible above the pie tent, far enough that nobody has to smell smoke while they eat funnel cake. Rimrock decided, apparently by unanimous and unspoken vote, that the fundraiser goes on.

July’s showing off anyway. The Rockies stand up hard and shimmering grey to the west, snow still clinging to the highest folds even with the valley floor baking gold, and the sky behind them is the kind of relentless, cloudless blue that doesn’t look real in photographs, the kind you only believe once you’ve stood underneath it and felt your shoulders start to burn. Lupine and Indian paintbrush crowd the ditches all the way from the highway, and the fairground fence is lined with posters of the youth hockey and football rosters, kids grinning gap-toothed under helmets two sizes too big, last season’s team photo blown up poster-size by the entry gate like Rimrock’s proudest export.

“Step right up, step right up.” Ashley’s got a clipboard in one hand and a megaphone she absolutely does not need in a town this size, her sundress covered in little embroidered pinecones like she coordinated her outfit with the mountains. “All proceeds to Rimrock Youth Hockey and Football. Knock the county’s favorite rancher into the drink.”

Knox, soaked to the collar and glaring at the crowd from inside the tank like a man reconsidering every choice that led him here, catches my eye and mouths help me. I toast him with my lemonade instead.

Half the crowd wandering the food trucks isn’t even local. Glacier National Park traffic runs straight through Rimrock all summer, RVs the size of small buildings crawling Main Street at fifteen miles an hour, tourists in visors and brand-new hiking boots stopping to photograph a dunk tank they have no context for, no idea they’re looking at the county’s two most dangerous families raising money for youth sports like there isn’t a dead informant and a burned records office between them.

One of them, a guy my age in a faded University of Montana shirt that says he’s either an alum or bought it at a gas station this morning, is currently standing a little too close to the raffle table, smiling at me like he’s found the best thing at the fair and hasn’t yet noticed it comes with security detail. Maren’s beside me working the other end of the same table, making change out of a cash box and half listening, which is how she listens to everything.

“You didn’t strike me as a small-town girl,” he says, nodding at the ticket roll in my hand. “Let me guess. You’re just here for the summer too.”

“Something like that.”

“I’m Brandon. We’re driving up to Glacier this afternoon, but my buddy said this place had the best pie in Montana, so.” He leans onto his hand on the table, easy, oblivious, the exact posture of a man who has no idea there’s a husband thirty feet away already tracking the distance between his hand and my shoulder. “You local?”