Page 39

She nods. "But it's not only Marcus. It's Legion and Badlands too, ya know? They carry the same thing. Different flavors of it, but the same wrong note underneath."

I don't have a response for that. Because while I didn't feel unsafe at Badlands—not personally, not with Legion standin' between me and everything else—it was precarious in a way that has no clean English word. Like standin' inside a loaded gun and calling it shelter. Like at any moment, one of them could simply decide the fate of someone else and the rest of the room would just nod, and there would be nothing to be done about it, no appeal, no higher court, no vote that meant anything if the wrong man was in a mood.

That's not a place. That's a condition.

"Are you tellin' me this is the reason you two left? To get away from… well, us?"

"Not you," Destiny says, and she says it clean, without the pause I was bracing for. "Not Legion. But it's all wrapped up together, Savannah, and I think you know that. You want me to come back. I know you do. And I know what you think of the people here, in Jackson Hole. And yeah, I get it, I do. But I haven't seen it here yet."

She adjusts Marigold against her shoulder, that unconscious competence mothers seem to develop overnight, and her voice drops half a register. "I haven't lived in it yet. So it's just the better choice. For now."

I let out a long breath, slow and deliberate. Resigned.

"Then I guess that's that," I say, and I mean it.

But there's something else. Something I've been holdin' onto since I went down into the vault and found all those pictures of Matthias and Eleanor. Since I handed over the box of slides to my oldest brother.

So I quickly add, "I can say this much, though. Cash is up to something. And it's got to do with Marcus, and his whole family alongside ours, and I think—" I pause, because I want to mean the next part, really mean it, not just say it out loud to hear how it sounds— "I think things are about to change around Drybone."

Destiny looks at me over the top of Marigold's head, and her smile is slow and knowing and a little bit like sunlight comin' through a crack in something that's been sealed up a long time.

"Well," she says, "I am not opposed to goin' home, if that change ever happens."

We stare at each other for a few seconds, and something settles between us. I nod. And then I smile, and it's real, which is somethin' I haven't been able to say about every smile I've offered lately.

"Would you like to come into town with me? I've got to make a trip to the drugstore, and then we can have some lunch and take in the scenery and appreciate the fact that winter's gonna be here in a matter of days—which is not a tragedy, actually, because it means a new beginning is just right around the corner."

Destiny looks at me like I'm a little strange, which is fair. I do tend to make philosophy out of errands.

"I'd love to," she says.

We grab our coats and bundle Marigold into her carrier—all pink cheeks, and starfish hands, and that impossible blonde hair that keeps catching the light like a small, indignant sun—and we take Colt's car, because the seat is already in there and neither one of us wants to negotiate the architecture of an infant travel system right now.

Destiny drives. I sit in the passenger seat and look out the window at the Tetons rollin' by. And the whole thing feels easy in a way I wasn't expectin'.

Like she's a new person in my life and I'm a new person in hers, and we're both just standin' at the edge of something and decidin' together not to be afraid of it.

We're gonna be friends.

CHAPTER 11

I get it.

As a born-and-raised Montana man, fly fishin' should be in my blood. Fuckin' River Runs Through It and all that bullshit. Like the state comes with a warranty that says you're automatically gonna love standin' in a freezin'-ass river, pretending a hook dressed up in fur and feathers is food. Like somewhere between birth and now I was supposed to develop a deep and abiding passion for waitin' on a fish to make a bad decision.

A man in his early thirties standin' in a freezin'-ass river wearin' waders and boots that aren't his, holdin' a pole with a tangled line and bits of fur and feathers on the end of an unreasonably long cast is just Tuesday to these people. It's religion. It's fuckin' heritage. They get this look on 'em, this settled, righteous look, like the river's confessin' somethin' to 'em personally and they're holy enough to hear it.

I don't hear shit but cold water and my own teeth threatening to chatter.

But contrary to popular belief, not all Montana men fish. Some of us just drink whiskey, and ride bikes, and have never once stood in a sporting goods store starin' at a three-hundred-dollar pair of waterproof pants thinkin', yeah, that tracks.

Some of us grew up in a trailer where the heat cut out in February, and the pipes froze in January, and the idea of voluntarily steppin' into a river was the kind of logic that got a man committed.

You are here for Savannah, I remind myself.

Constantly.

Every second, actually.