Page 10 of The Lonely Road

Bailey laughs and walks over to the other end of the bar, where someone called Noelle, a woman who is more primped up than she needs to be, wants a drink for her and her date, a cowboy who looks old enough to be her father but probably isn’t.

Kaz shakes his head and grins. “So, you’re a land surveyor?”

He says it like he doesn’t believe it.

“And you’re a land developer,” I counter, like I don’t believe it.

Kaz is working for some alphabet government agency, I’m sure of it.

“Feig’s been tellin’ stories.”

I tilt my head in acknowledgment.

“Where you from?” It’s not an interrogation, technically.

“I have a place in New York.”

“You don’t look like a New Yorker.”

I shrug. “Originally from Ohio.”

That is met with an arched eyebrow and a long draw of whiskey.

I was born and raised in Toledo. My father drove long-haul until his back gave out, and then he drove anyway because there was no alternative. My mother worked the Holiday Inn front desk for twenty-two years and knew every guest’s name by the first morning, and none of them ever knew hers.

I was raised in a solidly working-class home and couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Dodge. I did when I enlisted in the Army at eighteen, partly because I wanted out of my hometown and partly because no one in my family had ever gone to college, and I didn’t yet know that was an option for someone like me.

My younger siblings both went to college—I paid for it, or rather, the US Army did, once they determined that my set of aptitudes was most useful in contexts that didn’t appear in any recruitment brochure.

My younger brother was the first in my family to receive a degree in chemistry and is now a teacher in Orlando. My younger sister is the success story who moved to California to study at UC Berkeley and then climbed the corporate ladder at an IT company. She’s made more money than most people dream of. I’m proud of both of them.

I was in special operations—the part of the military that lives in the gap between what governments authorize and what they need done anyway.

I was good at it the way some people are good at mathematics—not because I enjoyed it, but because the aptitude was there, and the institution found it and put it to use.

I did two tours.

I was also part of three operations I will never discuss in any context because they are classified.

I could—and can—enter a room, read every person in it, identify the threat, the asset, the exit, and the variable—in that order—in under ten seconds. I can hold a cover identity for months without the seams showing. I can make a decision with incomplete information and live with the outcome, which is the rarest skill of all.

One that still comes for me sometimes at three in the morning, not with guilt exactly—guilt requires a belief that you could have chosen differently, and I’m not sure I could have—but with the weight of knowing exactly what you’re capable of and having to decide, every day afterward, what to do with that knowledge.

I got out at twenty-eight with a clearance and the absolute certainty that the skills I’d spent years developing would not disappear just because I’d changed employers.

“How long are you planning to stay in town?” Kaz isn’t exactly interrogating me.

“Until the work’s done.”

“The rodeo’s a good idea. Wildflower Canyon needs it.” He turns his glass slightly. “You do much of this kind of work? Site assessment?”

“Enough.” I let that settle. “You?”

“I’m on the acquisition side. Different part of the process.” He finally meets my gaze, as if now he needs to see my eyes. “Where were you before this?”

“Here and there.”

“Military.” It’s not a question.