Page 67 of Smoke Season

Hope flickered in Mel. “You didn’t think you had already?”

“Had I?” He was studying her again, but this time, Mel didn’t think he was trying to identify bruising. At least not the ones evident on her skin.

“No,” she said softly. “You hadn’t. You still haven’t.” The moment she had watched him let the house on Highline burn to the ground, the last of that chip on her shoulder, the one that had weighed her down for far too long, had lifted.

A breath Sam must have been holding came out in a choked sort of sob, and he pulled her to him tightly. “I know I haven’t always done right by you,” he said into her ear. “By you or by Annie.”

Mel shook her head against his chest. “Working for Fallows—even for Annie’s sake—kept me tied to that man every bit as much—more, maybe—than you hanging onto the house ever did.”

Sam embraced her tighter in response, and in that touch, she felt a sort of release, a deflating of the pressure that had lived in her body for so long. After clawing her way through motherhood from the moment Annie had been born, she, like Sam, now had to let go of the fear of not being enough, providing enough, giving enough, for the people who mattered most.

She pulled back to look at him, an almost forgotten but much more welcome heat stirring within her as their shared culpability of impossible choices burned off in the air between them.

“Let’s get the girls and get out of here,” she said. “Together.”

They found True by the door, Annie on one hip, no easy load to cart around, Mel knew. As she relieved her of the burden, True’s eyes flitted from Mel to Sam with caution. “We all good?”

“All good,” Sam said, laying a hand on her shoulder as Mel added, “No more secrets,” with a sigh of relief.

Annie’s eyes flitted closed against the crook of Mel’s neck. “Mommy, I just want to sleep now. Can we go home?”

Mel pushed that problematic word—home—stubbornly aside and focused only on thesleeppart. She and Sam had been trained by proxy by the best pediatric-cardiology team in the Pacific Northwest. Tired equaled low O2, and low O2 could almost always be attributed to subpar circulation. What caused subpar circulation? A weak heart. It always came back around to Annie’s heart. She studied Annie more closely. They couldn’t risk another tet spell.

She addressed Sam over the top of Annie’s head. “Forget the shelter. We need to get her out of this smokenow, before she worsens again.”

He didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Directly to Portland, then, where she’s closer to her cardio team.”

“Where’s her medical bag?” True asked.

“Astor managed to bring it with her, though not all the medications made it along for the ride. At last it’s not charred to bits, still in the cab of Claude’s truck.”

True’s face fell. “Maybe we should have stashed away some of Fallows’s cash after all. We didn’t know you’d need it to replace the prescriptions.”

Mel gripped her hand. “We needed Fallows put away more.”

“And if that money had been on you when he ran you off the road, he would have jumped you for it in about thirty seconds,” Sam muttered. “And be in the wind about five minutes after that.”

Mel’s steps faltered, the implication of what this meant hitting her full force. “Evading the arrest that was crucial to silencing his threats,” she said.

True smiled at her. “Well done. I would have rather that money burn to ashes than end up back in Fallows’s grubby hands.”

“We’re not criminals,” Mel agreed. She glanced at Sam. “This whole summer, it’s felt like ...” She searched for just the right term. “Bad juju.”

“Bad karma,” True said.

“Bad blood,” Sam added darkly.

“Besides,” True said with a slight upturn of her lips. “Photos can get erased, or photoshopped. Without that physical evidence—all of it—it would have just been Fallows’s word against ours.”

“Which is hopefully still at least slightly more respected in this town,” Sam said. He added a soft, if slight, smile to punctuate this, and when Mel smiled back, True caught the look between them and grinned, too.

“About damned time,” she said as they made the dash through the parking lot to get Annie into a car and out of the smoke of Carbon.

Mop-Up

CHAPTER 31

July 15

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