Page 141 of The Lonely Road

Bravado.

False or not, it’s my lifeline.

The hope I carry.

Because without Taya, I don’t know how to live my life now. A few short weeks with her, and the entire DNA of my life has been rearranged.

It’s exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

Gary at the front desk looks at me expressionlessly.

This is Wildflower Canyon, and taciturn he may be, but he knows what’s going on in his town just like everyone else does. By sunup, everyone will know Mason Brooks crawled right back.

“Same room?” he grunts.

“Please.”

“You’re lucky it’s still available,” he says, the subtext clear: you’re lucky it’s still available to you.

I carry my bag upstairs.

It’s the same room. No change. Clean like always.

The colorful quilt.

The infernally ticking radiator.

The window that faces the mountains goes from blue to rose to purple in stages, holding the light in the canyon for so long that you think it’s a static painting.

I unpack.

As a man who travels a lot, it’s the first thing I do.

I hang the shirts. I slide the underwear, T-shirts, and jeans into the drawers. I put the toiletries on the sink in the bathroom.

As a man who travels a lot, I travel light. In any case, Wildflower Canyon is not a place where you bring your Brunello Cucinelli or Loro Piana clothes. No matter how much Pretty Boy Kaz, who wears that shit, thinks.

After, I sit on the edge of the bed.

I run through my plans and the decisions I made during the drive.

First things first, I need to hand over Jessup—or my part of it—to Kaz. The operational part of me that has been doing this for eleven years and is, whatever else has happened, still functional—knows the sequence.

But the other part is sitting on the edge of a bed in the Ridgeline Inn, looking at the mountains and thinking about a four-year-old in a yard who walked past a man like Trafton because I wasn’t honest enough and left a job half-done and called it protecting her.

I look at my watch. Six in the evening. I have dinner with the Sheriff at eight. Kaz set it up.

“Do we have to meet in public?” I mused on the phone when I got off the plane and returned his call, which had gone to voicemail while I was in the air.

“It’s Hugh’s call.”

“Right.”

“He likes his entertainment, and you’re gonna get slaughtered out there. They like Taya. They don’t like you.”

“Right.”

“He promised he won’t let anyone break any bones. The rest…well, you gotta roll with the punches.”