Page 40 of Thunder

"It's my job."

But she says it without the ice, and she lingers a second at the rail instead of heading straight for her truck, and I know my sister well enough even now to know when she's got something sitting on her she can't decide whether to say.

"Presley." She keeps her eyes on the heifer. "Has Dakota talked to you?"

My stomach drops. "Dakota doesn't talk to me. You know that."

"Right."

A muscle works in her jaw. "Well. She's—there's a problem, and I don't even know why I'm telling you, except you already know the worst of it, so—" She stops and starts over, lower.

"That investigator. The one Dakota hired back in the spring, before we knew. Back when we still thought Mom just up and left." Her eyes flick to me, weighted, and I understand she's choosing every word around what neither of us will say out loud at a cattle pen in broad daylight. "She called him off months ago. Or she thought she did. He called her again last week."

The whole world goes still and cold around me.

"Called her for what?" I manage. "She told him to stop."

"He didn't stop. He's the type that can't. Says he turned up some record that didn't sit right, a loose end he can't leave alone, and he wants to keep going. On his own dime, even. Like it's a puzzle he's got to finish." Grace's jaw is tight enough to crack. "Dakota's beside herself. She can't exactly tell him why to quit, can she. Can't say a word about why. So she just keeps telling him to drop it, and he just keeps not dropping it."

She doesn't have to spell it out.

She knows I know, and I know she knows, and we stand there on either side of the rail both holding the same unspeakable thing.

Because a paid man with a grudge and a loose thread, pulling on the disappearance of a woman who supposedly drove off and left no trace, doesn't find a runaway wife living her best life in Arizona.

I have to grip the top rail so my hands don't shake where Grace can see them.

Because I know exactly where she went.

He finds a body.

And a body finds my father.

And my mother.

And every man who put her in the ground.

Grace is still talking.

I make myself hear her through the roaring in my ears.

"—keep telling her to let it die, that some men lose interest if you starve them long enough, but you know Dakota. Once she's decided something she can't leave it alone. She's got it into her head that she has to be the one to manage him, steer him, keep him pointed anywhere but⁠—"

Grace catches herself, glances at me, clamps back down. "Anywhere but the right direction."

She shakes her head, and for a second the ice is all the way gone and she just looks tired, and scared, and like the sister I was starting to have before everything broke. "I keep thinking about that day. What we all found out. And then I think about that man out there with a shovel's worth of curiosity and no idea what he's actually digging toward—" She stops hard. "Never mind. I shouldn't have said anything. Not to you, of all people. It's not your problem."

It's not your problem.

It is so much my problem that I can hardly breathe around it, and I can't tell her a single piece of why.

Because here's what I don’t think my grieving sister, standing at a cattle pen in the afternoon sun, understands.

If that investigator finds what he's looking for, it doesn't just hurt Mom and Pops.

It takes down four men who buried her. It takes Blaze, Spur, and Banshee. And it takes Thunder.

Thunder, who I let back in.