Page 3 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Sheriff

Except I’ve got blue paint on a cheekbone—stuck behind my eyes like a smear I can’t blink off.

Snickerdoodles. Christ.

My phone buzzes. Deputy Tate, who is twenty-six and thinks I hung the moon, which I’m working on curing him of.

Tate: Everything ok out at the Pruitt place? Saw you rolled on it yourself.

Tate: I coulda taken that one, boss. You were off shift.

I look at the message at the stop sign where FR-12 hits the highway, and there’s nobody coming in either direction for a country mile, just me and the dark and a question with an easy answer.

Sure. It’s a nothing call. If it happens again, you can handle it.

That’s the answer. That’s the correct, sane answer of a man who did eleven years and came home to do less.

Me: I’ve got it.

I hit send before I can think about why.

Then I sit at the empty stop sign a second longer than necessary. Because for reasons I don’t want to examine too closely, I’m not quite ready to be too far from Miss not Mrs Hope Bailey.

chapter

two

Hope

His taillights are barely off the end of my drive before my knees give out and deposit me on the porch step.

I sit there in the dark and replay it. All of it. The ladder. The twirl—God, the twirl, I did a little twirl, see, Sheriff, I’m all good. He’d stood there just staring at me with his assessing green eyes. Those eyes have seen things; that much is clear. And there I was twirling and acting like a fool.

Then I go inside for water, and I catch myself in the mirror over the sink.

There is a stripe of cadmium blue up one cheekbone. A bold one. Confident. The kind of mark you’d make on purpose if you were trying to communicate war to a rival tribe.

It was there the whole time. It was there for the ladder and the twirl and the perimeter walk and the snickerdoodle rejection. I met the new sheriff of Bluebonnet County looking like a Smurf who lost a bar fight. And I’d had no idea. He’s probably laughing about it now. How I’d stood there and offered him cookies while looking like an utter mess.

I want to lie down in the yard and let the watch call somebody about it.

I look down at the watch still sitting on my wrist, with its cheerful yellow band. “Traitor,” I mutter. I have the sudden, powerful urge to drop it in the toilet.

I don't. Partly because it cost more than I like to think about, even secondhand. Mostly because the whole reason I have the stupid thing is that a doctor with kind eyes and a clipboard told me to wear it. Let's just keep an eye on that heart rate, Miss Bailey. Nothing to worry about. Only to be safe.

Here's the thing about me that nobody knows about me… Okay, my foster sisters Cora and Jules know, but no one else. I have spent my entire adult life making very sure I never have to rely on someone else for anything. It’s fine if I want to ask for help, but for the most part I approach life with the confidence of a three-year-old: I can do it myself.

I do my own oil changes. I killed the wasp nest over the porch myself, with only a broom and a murderous attitude. I bought this old, neglected house alone and I am fixing it alone, one crooked shelf at a time. That is the entire hard-won point of me; I don't need anyone to save me.

And now I've got a gadget strapped to my wrist. A gadget that managed to call the most competent man I've ever laid eyes on. Nothing says thriving, self-sufficient woman quite like flinking your arms out and twirling.

So yeah, I’m pretty mortified by today’s events. So I do the only thing that has ever reliably helped: hand the humiliation to the two people morally obligated to love me through it: Cora and Jules.

Me: So… update. I summoned law enforcement with my body today.

Me: Nobody died. Well, except me. But that was only death by shame.

Me: I died in the yard. It was over quick.

Cora: What is happening? Are you okay?