Page 89 of The Cowboy's Second Chance Bride

Though I wasn’t sure whatitwas supposed to be. Should I mourn? Cry? Rage? I decided on all the above.

I stood in the burnt-out garage and stared. Everything was replaceable. That was what I told myself. Maybe I’d lost pictures, but most of them, I’d stored in the cloud. But I’d lost other things: the first saddle I’d had as a child, which my mom had picked out. My dad’s favorite blanket. The records he and my mom had collected in their short marriage. That was what I couldn’t replace, and it would take seeing those things in pictures to realize they were gone. So Dalton had taken away my desire to have those memories or maybe just added an ache to them.

“Maybe I should go through the house again to see if I can find anything worth saving. Maybe I missed something the first walk-through.”

“I’m sorry.” Nick’s voice was heavy with empathy as he looked around. He squeezed my shoulder in comfort. “You know all this can wait. You two shouldn’t put off a honeymoon in order to take care of this.” He gestured to the charred space. “I bet disrupting that was part of the plan.”

“It is hard to think about going away. It’s too much to process right now. I lost so much.” I turned to the left and pointed in front of me. “That wall was all decorations. Christmas, Halloween. My tree is gone. All the ornaments I made for my parents. The ones I collected over the years. All those keepsakes are gone.” I turned to the right and pointed. “On that wall, I had my dad’s tools and car-washing stuff, and even though all that can be replaced, I’m still so sad about losing it that I…” I wiped tears off my face. I couldn’t sum up how I felt and was at a loss for words.

Dalton knew how to cut deep. The house, I could rebuild. But the items that would trigger memories were gone forever.

“What do you think they were looking for?” The house being ransacked told us that much. Why take the time to go through a house when starting a fire and getting out of dodge only took a handful of minutes.

I shrugged. “And do you think they started the fire because they couldn’t find whatever they were looking for?”

“That’s my guess.”

Nick walked over to the pile the fire inspector had made when he’d done his investigation. It consisted of a metal box the length of my forearm and a foot deep, my SUV’s license plate, and a few tools. “What’s in this box?”

I pulled my attention off the loss and onto the box. I couldn’t place what I had used it for. Maybe the fire had discolored it and I was too far into my trauma response to put the brain power into figuring it out. “I’m not sure.”

“A fireproof metal box. Do you have so many you can’t remember them all?” Nick reached for a tool. “Mind if I open it?”

I shook my head. “I have three, but I don’t remember any of them being in the garage.” I began to search through the remains for anything worth keeping.

“Sabrina.” The tone of his voice made me look at him. He was staring at me, slack-jawed. “It’s some papers of your dad’s. There’s an unopened letter addressed to you in this box.”

“What?” After the funeral, I’d gone through everything… hadn’t I? I walked to Nick and looked into the box.

“Does any of this look familiar?”

I shook my head. All of my dad’s important paperwork had been in my fireproof safe inside my bedroom closet. Well, the closet was gone, but the safe was still there. Fortunately.

“I don’t think I ever saw this.” I turned back to the space where the wall of decorations used to be and tried to picture it.

“You know, after Melissa died, I had to go through all her stuff. At one point, I hit a wall and couldn’t do it anymore. So I stopped. A few years ago, I was in our closet and realized I hadn’t cleaned it out. Her clothes were still there. Her shoes and purses. So much of her, and I had lived with it all there because I didn’t want it to go away, as if taking out her stuff would really and truly mean she was gone for good. After Travis died, did you even think of going through the garage?”

I shook my head.

He picked up the letter and handed it to me. “Maybe Travis even forgot it was out here. Maybe he meant to do something with it, but you know how hard those last few months were. He and Melissa weren’t themselves.”

At the end of both Melissa and Dad’s lives, it had been about pain management. I flipped the envelope over. It was card-sized. His penmanship on the page was even and easy to read, which told me he’d written this before things got really bad.

I slid my finger under the flap, opened the envelope, and withdrew three pieces of paper. One was a letter from my dad to me, and the other was a note from my mom—well, more a bullet list than a letter—and it explained the third piece of paper.

“She lists out things like you do,” Nick said as he read over my shoulder.

I unfolded the third piece of paper, and we both studied it. “Holy shit,” we said in unison.

ChapterThirty-Five

CAL

Iwas supposed to go to the ranch, but after Sabrina took the flight back to her house and I was jogging toward my charter, I was struck with a random thought. In my business, there were the things going on around you. These were typically in your face and consumed a lot of energy, but there were also undercurrents. The undercurrents were what I was trained to interpret. They were what packed a punch.

In Peru, the asset had been the target of a loud group of activists who opposed him on everything. They made his life difficult, and being out in public tended to get contentious. They’d resorted to flinging paint and disrupting vacations. That was their agenda in Peru. But the undercurrent was the husband of the woman the asset had an affair with, and of course, the asset had never told us about said affair. The husband had used the activists as a cover when he drew his gun and aimed at the asset. And though I wasn’t a fan of the asset’s personal life and practice, the job offered a much needed change of environment, the sole reason I’d taken the job. And it ended with a bullet hitting me.

At the stairs to the charter, I paused and pulled out my phone. At the moment, a lot was happening on the surface, but there had to be an undercurrent, a hidden agenda. I called Spoon and had him dig into Dalton’s schedule and current business deals. My gut told me to pause my flight, which I did while I waited for Spoon to do his magic.

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