Page 43 of Worth the Trouble

“Just let her have it. It’s only a towel,” said Rylee.

Jason sat where he was and looked at Cece laughing into her hands, and he didn’t want to be anywhere else.

The lodge road was dark and the heater in the truck wasn’t quite up to doing the full job of keeping them warm. Cece sat with her hands in her coat pockets and her head against the window. She was quiet, which he’d learned meant she was working through a thought and not that anything was wrong.

He let her think.

Past the turn where the trees closed in, she said, “I forgot what that feels like.”

“What.”

“A family at a table.” She didn’t lift her head off the glass. “Arguing about a picture nobody has. Somebody’s pig coming into the house.” A breath. “It’s been my father and me across a hotel table for eight years. I didn’t know I’d forgotten what it feels like to be with a family.”

Jason reached across the cab and took her hand out of her pocket and held it keeping his eyes on the road. There were things a man couldn’t look at and drive through at the same time.

She turned her hand over in his and held on.

The shine of it hadn’t worn off yet when Tate came looking for him with a face Jason hadn’t seen since the summer.

Jason was in the round pen with the Baileys’ mare, working her on a long line, when Tate came around the barn and stopped at the rail. He didn’t say anything at first, which was Jason’s trick, not his. That alone put a cold spot in Jason’s gut.

He brought the mare down to a walk, then a halt, and let the line go slack. “Say it.”

“The rezoning meeting’s dead,” Tate said. “Council threw it out. The notices never went up. Half the town that should’ve been told never heard a word.”

Jason waited. That wasn’t the face. The town had been fighting Reginald Williams all year, and Tate delivered news of that fight without heat, win or lose. This was something else.

“There’s more,” Jason said.

“There’s more.” Tate took his hat off, which he only did for church and bad news. “The council didn’t like the look of it, so they put Kyle Sinclair in a room and asked him how a public meeting goes missing its public. Kyle’s seat was on the line, so Kyle talked.” He turned the hat in his hands. “He says somebody came to him and asked him to keep the notices inside City Hall. Says she came back a second time to make sure it stayed done.”

“She.”

“Jason.” Tate said it low and steady, and that was the worst part. He wasn’t angry. Angry would’ve been easier. “He named Cecelia Williams.”

The mare stirred behind him, sensing a change in the pen that hadn’t been there a minute ago. Jason breathed until she settled. It was the only thing he knew how to do right then that he could do.

“Kyle’s covering for somebody,” he said. “Himself, most likely.”

“I thought that too. First thing I thought.” Tate hung the hat on the post as if buying himself a second. “So before I walked over here, I went and asked at the clerk’s office myself. She was there, Jason. Twice. Signed in at the front desk both times, because that’s the one book in that building nobody thought to keep quiet.”

Jason looked at the mare. She looked back at him with the big simple honesty horses had, the thing he’d built his whole life around. Horses don’t lie. That was people.

“I want to be wrong,” Tate said. “You understand me? I sat across a table from her and passed her the rolls and liked her. Rylee likes her. I want Kyle to be a liar and I want the sign-in book to be somebody else’s handwriting. But I’ve been to this rodeo before, little brother. I spent a whole season learning what it costs to look away from a thing because looking at it hurts.”

“Don’t.” It came out flat.

“I have to.” And then Tate did the thing Jason would remember longest. He didn’t shout, and he didn’t pace, and he didn’t tell Jason what to do. He stood at the rail of the round pen and laid it out one post at a time. “I’m not talking about her father. You knew who her father was from the start, and so did I, and I shook her hand at my own table anyway. I’m talking about what she did. There were people all over town with a right to stand up in that meeting. Faith. Brent’s cousins. The Gilleys. Rylee, who owns land on that border. Somebody made sure they never knew the room existed. That’s not being born with the wrong last name. That’s a thing a person chose to do, on an ordinary afternoon, with her own two hands.”

Every word landed.

“You’re the best judge of animals in this town,” Tate said. “Better than me, better than anybody. So I’m not going to stand here and tell you what she is. I told you what I know, and now I’m going to go home and hope to God there’s another side to it.” He picked his hat back up. “You’re about to hang your name on a barn and ask this town to trust you with what they love. You deserved to hear it from me first. That’s all this is.”

He was halfway to his truck before Jason spoke.

“Tate.”

His brother stopped.