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I get up to make a cup of hot cocoa and while I wait for the kettle to boil, I stare at Dash’s door. Where the hell does he go in the middle of the night? I tap my foot. Chew the inside of my cheek. His door practically calls my name.
Dash had only two rules for living together, and he was fine breaking one. The other won’t hurt. I tiptoe, for absolutely no reason at all, over to his door and half expect an alarm to rage when I turn the knob. It doesn’t, and when I step into Dash’s room, his dog, Memphis, tips his head up from his bed in the corner.
I point at him. “Don’t tell on me.”
He lays his head back down.
I wonder what he could possibly not want me to see in here. What could be hidden underneath that perfectly made bed or in that shiny, dust-free dresser of his?
I crouch and use my cell light to illuminate a completely barren landscape of flat wood flooring. Hm. Sliding my hands under his pillows, I come up empty. I smooth the creases I made in his cotton covers back to the military crisp I found. All else that’s in here is his closet, which also reveals nothing, so I head for the drawers. It’s the most obvious place of all, but I also fear the hardest one to snoop in without being detected.
But to my surprise, Dash’s secret isn’t hidden under a mound of socks or folded into the last pair of boxers in a pile. In the top drawer, there’s nothing but maybe twelve or fifteen identical leather notebooks and a pen. I take the one from the top and open it. The first page shows Dash’s writing, and it’s something of a title page. He’s written:Mustang Valley January 2023.And every page after is a date, notes, and a bunch of numbers. Measurements? One page he writes about pipe quality. On another page, he’s written:5 new foals.On another:stallion missing.
Page after page is the same, until I come to yesterday’s date, and he’s simply scrolled:watering hole frozen.
I pinch my eyebrows together, flipping through these notes like it’s some sort of hieroglyph or code to crack. I don’t know what his notes mean, but one thing is crystal clear. Every night, apart from several skipped in the sequence, he goes to Mustang Valley.
Mustang Valley. His favorite place on earth.
The kettle whistles, and I jump so hard I drop the notebook on the floor. Shit. I hope it didn’t dent. The high-pitched squeal continues as I quickly examine the cover of the notebook. It seems unscathed, and I try to put it in the exact same position as I found it, rush out of the room, and grab the kettle off the burner.
I brace myself on the counter, wondering what takes him to that place. How it can be so special that he does the graveyard shift there every day of his life? Since… gosh, it looked like there are years’ worth of notebooks there.
Maybe that’s the real reason he was never that good in school. Was he up in the middle of the night as a teen?
I pull up a new browser page on my cell and search for Mustang Valley, New Mexico, click through to a map and see it’s actually super close to here. My short fingernails make a blunt sound when I tap them on the counter, telling myself I’m an idiot for even considering it. This is crazy. It’s like, three in the morning, it’s damn cold outside, and dark…
But the next thing I know, I have my coat on and Memphis on the passenger seat. And the new boots he bought for me are pressing down on my accelerator.
I’ve gone totally mad.
ChapterSeventeen
DASH
Ain’t gonna lie.I’m goddamn tired today. I’m not sure if I managed a few winks in between the tossing and turning. I worked myself delirious once I heard Molly come home. I knew I shouldn’t have moved back. But I went and did it anyway. This has been happening constantly in my world since Molly has become… athing.
When my alarm went off, I already looked at the red numbers enough times to have anticipated it and slapped it off within one buzz. I tried to be quiet as usual, hoping to not disturb my sleeping beauty, and crept out to the place that used to give me solace.
But when I get to the Valley tonight, I’m too unsettled for even the relaxing moonlight on the mountains to put me on the right path. I’m struggling to resist that woman and yet I found myself moving back in. I’ve lost control.
Control is what I need. Finding control after my dad died is what got me through all these years. Control. Predictability. And resisting…feelings. Molly bites into all the basics. She constantly surprises me with her determination, her ideas, her kindness, and whatever happens when I’m in her presence is like magic. It has no place in this world. Not in my world anyway.
I work my way down the pipe with my headlamp on. I’ve always been a night owl, but once my dad passed, what I like most about night here is the sight deprivation. All I see when I work is a five-foot-wide portion of the world. All I can do, see, touch, and hear exists in my lamp’s spotlight. Usually. But tonight, I make my way down the path, following the pipe and still, a whole world of thoughts are shining in my head.
Just then, a dog barks up on the cliff top.Mydog. Memphis? And then… a scream followed by the distinct sound of something falling down the steep hillside.
The dog keeps barking.
“Memphis?” I shout into the wide valley, and my voice echoes a thousand times.
Woof. Woof. Woof.
Yeah, that’s my dog all right… who the fuck stole my dog and came here? I run in the direction of his barking, and a distressed woman’s voice sounds out.
“Dash! Is that you?” The woman makes a noise something between strain and burning tears. “Dash, hurry… I need help…”
Molly?
