Page 28 of Devoured By the Forbidden Mountain Man

Then she said, “Brad wasn’t finished, though. He never knew when to stop once he decided someone had embarrassed him.”

The sentence landed differently, and I kept my face neutral even as my attention sharpened.

“You mean in general?”

Meredith looked directly at me while the silence between us stretched.

“Yes,” she said eventually. “In general.”

It wasn’t convincing.

I set down the mug.

“I’m not trying to catch you saying the wrong thing. I need you to know that before I ask anything else.”

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

“I’m not sure I do. Yesterday I thought I was looking at the name of a witness who might remember something useful. Now I’m talking to someone Gavin worried about before Brad died, and you just told me Brad wasn’t finished after the part of the night everyone already knows about.”

Meredith’s hand moved protectively over her stomach.

Her eyes were wet now, although her voice stayed steady.

“You have every right to ask me questions.”

“That doesn’t mean I have the right to force you to answer them.”

Something in her expression shifted.

I leaned back rather than toward the screen.

“What I need most is to understand Gavin. I spent years thinking that whatever happened after he made bail scared him enough to run. That never fit the brother I knew. Gavin could be reckless when he decided somebody needed protecting, but he wasn’t a coward.”

“He wasn’t.”

The answer came immediately, and I felt it more than heard it. Meredith looked down as though she wished she could pull the word back, so I gave her time.

When she finally raised her eyes, there was no easy way around what she had revealed.

“You sound very certain,” I said.

“I knew him well enough to know that much.”

“Did you?”

My voice remained quiet.

Meredith’s fingers went still against the table.

I could hear distant water running on her side of the call, followed by her husband saying something upstairs. The sounds of her present life filled the pause.

“I knew he wouldn’t run just because he was afraid of what might happen to him,” she said. “Gavin wasn’t built that way. He could make terrible decisions for what he thought were good reasons, but saving himself was never the thing that drove him.”

I stopped breathing normally because there was too much certainty in those words to dismiss as a character judgment.

“What drove him, then?”

Meredith closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked older than she had ten minutes earlier.