Page 99 of Reluctant Bride

“That’s what I did.”

“That’s not leadership, Dawson.” Finn’s voice now, closer to the phone than I expect, quieter than Maren’s fury and worse for it. “That’s not even sacrifice. Sacrifice isn’t leadership. It’s just leaving, dressed up nicer.”

Finn doesn’t get an answer either. Not one I can build fast enough to be worth his while. I stand in my own office with my wife reading a federal exposure file at my desk and my sister shaking on the other end of a phone call, and for the first time in longer than I can remember I don’t reach for the composed version of myself. I just let it land.

“You’re right,” I say. “Both of you. I’ll fix it. Tonight.”

Sage looks up from the file at that, her eyes holding something short of forgiveness that isn’t nothing either.

My other phone buzzes against the desk, a different tone entirely, the one that means dispatch instead of family.

I answer on the second ring.

“Rollover on the border route,” Jennifer says, and I know her voice well enough to hear the strain under it, real fear, not performance. “Southern gate stretch. The one that transferred to Mrs. Sullivan’s deed yesterday. Driver’s trapped, fuel’s leaking, and the responding unit says the gate camera’s already down.”

The road I gave her. The one clause in either contract that was just supposed to be simple.

“I’m on my way,” I say, moving, reaching for my keys off the hook by the door.

Sage is on her feet before I’ve finished the sentence, the file still open on the desk behind her.

“I’m coming.”

“Somebody’s got to be here when Maren shows up ready to put my head through a wall.” It’s not the real reason and we both know it, but it buys me the thirty seconds I need to clear the door before either of us has to say the true one out loud, that I can’t watch her face do what it did on that gravel road twice in one day. “I’ll call you the second I’m clear.”

I don’t wait for her to argue it. I’m in the truck, gravel spitting under the tires, my sister’s voice and Finn’s line and the look on Sage’s face all riding with me down the drive whether I asked them to or not.

The border route unwinds fast under my truck, the fence line catching flat, hard midday light. I see the wreck before I see anything else worth seeing, an empty stock trailer jackknifed across both lanes, one wheel still spinning slow against the sky.

I key the radio the second I’m in range.

“On scene. Talk to me. What have you got?”

Static answers. Then nothing at all, not even the hiss of an open channel, just the raw, total silence of a line that isn’t there anymore.

I check the screen. Full bars, five seconds ago. Dead now.

Sixty seconds. That’s all it takes, standing on an empty road with a trailer burning oil into the dirt and my own signal gone dark in my hand, before I understand that whatever’s waiting for me out here didn’t want the crash.

It wanted me alone on this exact stretch of road, unreachable, while my wife sits fifteen miles behind me watching a clock that isn’t moving fast enough.

THIRTY-THREE

SAGE

Sixty seconds. That’s how long a radio goes dead before dead stops meaning static and starts meaning something else.

I count them out loud, once, standing in the kitchen with Dawson’s second phone still warm from his hand on the counter in front of me, and then I stop counting, because counting past sixty doesn’t tell me anything sixty already didn’t.

“Say it again,” I tell Jennifer, who I have on speaker, her voice trying too hard to sound like this happens every Sunday. “The last transmission. Word for word.”

“He said he was on scene. Then nothing.”

“Nothing’s not a transmission, Jennifer. Nothing’s a hole where a transmission should be.” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t have room left in me for volume, only for precision, and precision is the only thing keeping my hands from doing what they were doing less than an hour ago, holding a signed document like it might rearrange itself into something survivable if I stared hard enough. “Pull the GPS ping before it dropped. I want coordinates, not a description.”

Jennifer reads them off within thirty seconds, and I write them down myself before anyone else in the kitchen even reaches for a pen. My handwriting comes out steadier than it has any right to.

The southern stretch. His own gift, a day old, still smelling like the ink on the deed transfer. He drove his wife’s road to look at a rollover, and it swallowed his signal whole.