Page 87 of The Lonely Road

I have been since sometime in March, when she stood at the door of Wild Coffee and said, “Don’t let Feig oversell the timeline”—meant it as a gift, a small honest thing offered to a man she barely knew because she’d decided he was worth the honesty. I’ve been in love with her through the auction and the restaurant in Marble and the barbecue and the kitchen and the Bear Dance grounds this morning, where she stepped into the women’s line in her grandmother’s shawl and moved like someone who has never once questioned where she belongs.

I am also the man who photographed her files.

The man who gave Jessup the shape of the Tom Reyes notation and has been making decisions about how much to give and when. The man who arrived in Wildflower Canyon with a hundred-page file and an assignment to dismantle her, and who has done—what exactly?

I am in love with her.

I am also the reason her case is vulnerable.

Both of these things are true. They are the two roads, and I cannot travel both, and now I am out of time to make a decision.

She watches me freeze. She doesn’t look away.

She’s not afraid of the silence. She’s the least afraid person I know.

I should tell her.

I know I should tell her.

I should open my mouth and say: I was hired to dismantle your case. I have documentation in my phone that could hurt you. I’ve been lying to you since March, and I’m sorry, and I would undo it if I could, and I love you, and I know that the love doesn’t fix the lie.

That’s the honest path.

I look at her face.

The shawl still across her shoulders, the silver at her ears, the quality of her eyes when she’s looking at me without the lawyer in them—just her, just the woman who drove me to the pull-off outside Durango.

If I tell her now, I take this day from her.

The Bear Dance.

Wíitsin’s kitchen.

I tell her now, and all of it gets overwritten.

She’ll think about it—she’ll think about this conversation for the rest of her life—and the Bear Dance will be colored by what came after, and the pull-off will be colored by it, and the frybread and Auntie Carol and Sienna laughing mid-step and Cam on my lap.

I can’t.

I know it’s a rationalization. I am a man who is very good at rationalizing. I know I'm performing mendacity. I do it anyway.

“That’s a bad idea, Counselor.”

The words come out evenly.

Flat.

The voice I use when I’m managing something.

Her expression alters for a fraction of a second—the quickest thing, the fastest recalibration I’ve ever seen—and then she goes still.

It's not the stillness of shock but of a woman absorbing information and beginning to process it.

“Taya.” I hold her gaze. “I’m only passing through.”

It’s the most cowardly sentence I’ve ever spoken.

The drums keep going outside.