Page 87 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Eleven calls. I count them on the screen at a red light in the middle of an empty town and I hate every one of them, because eleven calls is a man begging, and begging never opened a door in Nellie Greer's life. Begging is what her mama's men did on porches in eleven different towns while Nellie packed the boxes.

She won't answer begging.

The light turns green. I don't move.

Think, Peterson. She runs when she's scared. She's scared because she's carrying something she thinks will break me. So right now she's forty miles gone or four hundred, holding her secret in both hands, telling herself she got away clean. Any minute she shuts that phone off for good, picks a new town, and becomes somebody I never get to meet.

Unless she knows the secret's already out.

Unless there's nothing left to run with.

I pull up the message window. Her name at the top. Every text under it unanswered since Wednesday, little gray bubbles like stones down a well.

I type two words. I look at them until my eyes sting.

Then I hit send.

I know.

The screen says Delivered. I sit in the middle of the road, gripping the wheel, watching that screen like a man watching a doorway in the smoke.

Three dots appear.

Vanish.

Appear.

Vanish.

My whole life is three gray dots on a five-inch screen at a country crossroads. I'm not breathing. A hawk drops off a fence post outside the window like the world's got the nerve to keep on being ordinary.

The dots come back one more time. Hold. Hold.

Gone.

Then the phone buzzes in my hand, and it's not words at all.

It's a map.

A red pin, dropped on a spot up the highway. Lakeview Motor Lodge. Forty miles ahead.

No message. No name. Nothing else.

She's letting herself be found.

I pull up Tater's name and send two words of my own.

Found her.

His reply lands before I set the phone down. One word.

GO.

I put the truck in gear.

Chapter twenty-six

Room 6