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When she mentioned Chance, his expression changed again, this time becoming thoughtful. Funny, she’d always thought him so obsessed with his tech toys she’d never credited him much with ordinary, human thoughts. But he only turned and went to the door, letting in the big German shepherd, who paused to sniff at him but then kept coming until he was beside the chair.
“Yep, I’m stealing Dad’s chair,” she said to him as he looked up at her. “Don’t bite me.” Cody, still by the door he’d just closed again, looked at her sharply. “Joke, Rafferty. Chance would never have let us have him if he’d been that touchy still.”
Again that thoughtful look. “I know.”
When he didn’t say anything else, she felt compelled to tell him, “I’m fine. You can go now.”
“No, I can’t.”
She blinked. “Why?”
“I promised your mom I’d stay until she got back or your dad got home.”
Since Dad was in Waco helping a friend with a new bull, that wouldn’t be soon, and when Mom and Maggie got to talking…well, that might not be soon either.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I do. I promised. Otherwise one of them would have canceled and stayed home.”
That rang true. And part of her was glad he’d made that promise, so neither of her parents had had to duck a commitment. But that didn’t mean she wanted Cody the Coder hanging out with her.
“I’m just going to read,” she said.
“Until you need something Dodger can’t fetch, or need to get up.”
A brief vision of him helping her to the bathroom flashed through her mind, and heat rose to her cheeks. “I’ll be fine,” she said stiffly, even knowing that trying to do that on her own, the first day after the accident, could easily end in disaster.
“Yes. And I’ll stay out of your way. I brought work,” he said, gesturing with a thumb at a laptop she hadn’t noticed before, over on the bar that was this side of the kitchen counter.
She gave in because she had no choice. She spent a while contemplating the fact that she was stuck in the living room of the house she grew up in, with the last person she wanted to be with sitting a short distance away, stuck as much as she was, no doubt with the last person he’d ever wanted to be with.
That thought made her cringe inwardly, and she wasn’t sure why. Didn’t want to think about why. And it drove her to ask abruptly, “Why drones?”
His head came up from the laptop sharply, as if she’d startled him. “What?”
“Why, out of all the tech stuff you could be—” she almost said obsessed “—involved with, why drones? I mean I get that they’re handy for some things, useful even, but how did they become your main thing?”
He studied her for a moment, as if he were assessing whether she was actually interested, or just filling a silence. She wasn’t quite sure herself. He’d been, after all, quite involved in whatever he’d been looking at, so the silence hadn’t been uncomfortable.
At least not for him.
Maybe she was simply losing her mind. She’d write it off to maybe having hit her head harder than she’d thought, except they’d done tests and a scan at the hospital and she didn’t have even a slight concussion.
She had just decided he wasn’t going to answer her at all—and perhaps rightfully so—when he spoke.
“I’m working toward a silent drone with more range. There’s one, the KHA K1000, that was able to make an amazing twenty-six-hour flight because onboard sensors allowed it to ride thermals just like a bird. Problem is, it has a sixteen-foot wingspan. Not exactly portable.”
She hesitated, then said, “So that’s the what. Still wondering about why.”
For a moment she thought he really wasn’t going to answer this time. And when he did, it was in a voice she’d never heard from him before. Low, quiet, with a note almost of pain. By the time he finished the first sentence, she understood why.
“My father was killed when his platoon’s position was given away by the sound of a surveillance drone’s motor. It was just loud enough the enemy knew which way to look. Then they blasted away an entire hill, killing them all.”
She stared at him. She had never heard this, never known this part of the tragic story. Of course her parents wouldn’t go into that kind of detail, given her age at the time; she’d been a child.
So had he.
“I never knew that,” she said, only aware when it came out that she was barely managing a whisper. “No wonder you…”
