Page 63 of Smoke and Roses

I stare at him. My chest is vibrating, my insides are twisting. I’m cold all over.

“For her,” I say. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

“No.”

I blink at him, feeling the tremors climbing into my throat. “Why not? You found the receipt. You and Gabe figured it out. You could have driven out there before you ever came over here and⁠—”

“It’s not mine to ask,” he says.

I stop talking. He’s still crouched in front of me, with his hands on my knees and his jacket still zipped. He hasn’t even taken it off. He must have walked straight up the street from the station.

“Gabe offered,” he says. “He said somebody who wasn’t a cop should go talk to Hank. And I thought about it. I stood in the station for ten minutes and thought about getting in my truck and going out there and finding out what it was first, so I could walk in here with it all figured out and you’d never have to feel it.”

I choke back a sob.

His thumb moves on my knee. “But you’ve been waiting on this since you were seventeen, Lindsey. I’m not going in ahead of you. It’s your door.”

My door.

I can’t say anything. He could have done this instead and handed me the key.

“Lord help me,” I whisper. “Travis. You know how many people would have just gone?”

“Rob, probably.”

I laugh brokenly. He stands up and pulls me off my stool and into his chest. My pent-up energy comes out in a curse-and-sob mishmash. He steadies me the entire time with one hand on the back of my head. The other flat between my shoulder blades.

I’m mad at Hank and his Friday roses, and at a valley that took one deputy’s word for it and quit looking.

When I finally run out of words, I’ve got two fistfuls of his jacket and the print of his zipper on my cheek.

“Sorry,” I say, smoothing it flat. “It’s a nice jacket.”

“It’s a forty-dollar jacket from the Farm and Feed.” He tips my chin up with one cold knuckle and looks at me. “You okay?”

“Not even a little.” I exhale slowly. “I’m so angry at Hank I could spit, and I want to hug him at the same time, and I don’t know which one’s going to happen when I see him.”

“Maybe both.”

“Probably both.” I lean into his chest. “He looked right at me last night, Travis.”

“He’s been looking at you for a month,” Travis says. “Every morning since the fire at the ranch. He’s been at Marlene’s, watching you through the window.”

He has. Of course he has.

Travis rests his chin on top of my head. “I think he’s been waiting for somebody to come ask.”

She was a good, brave girl.

Maybe she still is. Maybe somewhere, right now, she still is.

The shop is closed, thanks to Heidi Stokes. Hank Simmons lives fifteen minutes away, out the Huntsville road, in a white farmhouse with yellow rosebushes along the front walk.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Give me one minute.”