Page 86 of Chasing the Other Woman

Hershel’s eyebrows lift. “What’s on your mind?”

“Something that should’ve happened a long time ago.”

He follows me a few yards away, out of the cluster of voices and flashing lights. We stop near a fence line that’s been stripped clean in places, wire sagging between broken posts.

I take a breath. It shakes on the way in. “I want to hand the operation to Sam.”

Hershel stares at me. Then he blinks once. “Run that by me again.”

“Storm Posse. Field calls. Team structure. Who goes where, who leads, who stays back. All of it.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

He studies my face for long enough that I start to feel the cold seeping straight through my wet clothes. “This about tonight?”

“It’s about every night before tonight.” I look down at my hands. Mud is dried in the creases of my knuckles. “I built the whole thing so everything ran through me. I decided who got in the lead truck, who stayed behind, which job made sense for who. It felt efficient. It felt like leadership.”

“It was leadership.”

“It was too much control in one place.” I look back at Sam. She listens to something Riley says, nodding quietly, and the sight of her hits me square in the chest. “It let me take her life away because I thought I was protecting her.”

Hershel’s jaw works.

“I don’t want to put her back on the team,” I say. “Not like I’m doing her a favor. Not like I still get to decide she belongs.”

“Brooks.”

“She makes the calls. If she wants me in the lead truck, I’m there. If she wants me somewhere else, I go. If she wants me off the road, I get off the road.” My voice drops. “If she wants me gone altogether, that’s her call too.”

Hershel lets out a slow breath. “And if that’s exactly what she wants?”

“Then I live with it.”

He says nothing.

“I’m done taking choices away from her because I’m scared,” I say. “I can’t tell her I trust her and still keep the setup that let me overrule her whenever fear took over.”

Hershel looks toward Sam, too. For once, he doesn’t deflect or try to soften it. “About damn time,” he says.

I almost laugh. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“That’s plenty.”

The motel parking lot looks like the aftermath of an evacuation.

Vehicles sit at odd angles beneath buzzing exterior lights. Mud cakes tires. Hoods are up. Someone has a folding table covered in laptops, water bottles, foil-wrapped burgers, and a bag of chips. Radios murmur in the background. Every few minutes, an argument breaks out over radar captures, road choices, wind speed, or whether Mark hesitated before the hail started.

No one says much about the shelter, not directly. They clap me on the shoulder hard. They check in with Sam. They ask if she needs food, water, aspirin, dry socks, or a ride back into town. They keep orbiting us, watching without making it obvious. It feels familiar in a way I forgot I was allowed to miss.

No Luci. No Tony. No tension hanging underneath every sentence.

Sam stands near Hershel’s truck, wearing a motel towel around her shoulders like a shawl. Her hair is damp and tangled. There’s a paper plate in her hand she keeps forgetting to eat from because she’s explaining something to Hershel with quiet intensity, eyes bright despite the exhaustion.

She looks like herself. Not the wife I pushed behind a desk. Not the woman I left wondering if she’d been replaced. Sam. The woman who once stood beside my truck after an eighteen-hour chase in the middle of nowhere and told me she’d stay with me as long as we were honest with each other.

She glances over. Our eyes catch.