Page 12 of Cold Case Discovery

“I think if you were honest about that, you’d have more of us supporting you. Even Anna might relent a little if she knew—”

“Hawk will keep her in line.”

“I can’t believe you just said that. Out loud. And no bolt of lightning came to strike you down like it very well should.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean he loves her. He’ll protect her, and that means keeping her from diving headfirst into all this.” Not that Jack was sure he’d succeed, but Hawk was the only chance of Anna actually listening. So Jack would depend on it.

Mary was silent for a long while. “Sometimes love isn’t about protecting people, Jack. Sometimes it’s just about loving them.” She didn’t wait for him to have any answer to that. She just left.

Jack refused to engage with that sentiment. It was his normal weekend off from the sheriff’s department anyway, so he went out and did some ranch chores. He went through hisnormalday, trying to shut everything off.

But it only seemed to settle deeper, tying tight, heavy knots in his gut, in his chest. Every step, every breath became harder. Every minute that ticked by seemed to be leading somewhere terrible.

Only nothing out of the ordinary happened. He had a normal dinner with his family. Well, notnormal. There was a heavy quiet that had taken over the house today. Even baby Caroline appeared to have gotten the memo and wasn’t overly fussy or energetic. No one could seem to muster a conversation that didn’t immediately lull into silence.

People excused themselves earlier than usual. No one ate dessert. Jack had cleanup duty with Carlyle, whose nervous energy seemed to suck all his own energy away. Or maybe it was the fact that he hadn’t really slept.

Once she’d brought all the dishes into the kitchen, she paused, staring at him. Since he’d never known her to hesitate over just about anything, he raised an eyebrow. “Something you wanted to say?”

“Cash wanted me to run it by you first, but I figure I’d tell Zeke,” she said, referring to her brothernotmixed up in the Hudson household. “He’s got all those crazy connections to underground spy people. I know you want Bent County handling it, but Zeke might have a line on a good... What did they call it? Forensic person or whatever? He knows some people who could poke around, and they wouldn’t get in Bent County’s way.”

Jack wanted to dismiss it out of hand. He wanted to dismiss everything out of hand, but the more people looking into this who weren’t his family, the quicker this could move. “That’d be fine, Carlyle. Thank you for asking.”

They worked in silence for a while; then, just about when they were finished and he thought he could escape to the isolation of his bedroom, Carlyle said something that stopped him in his tracks.

“Chloe’s a good listener.”

Jack turned his head slowly to stare at her. Her blue-gray eyes held his, but she didn’t look accusatory or like she was holding some secret over his head.

She shrugged. “I just know, from experience, sometimes you don’t want to, like...be a burden to your family. And I could sit here and lecture you for a million days how you’re not, but it doesn’t change the feeling you don’t want to unload on the people also going through what you’re going through.”

“What does that have to do with Deputy Brink?”

Carlyle rolled her eyes. “Chloe’sa good listener. That’s all I’m saying.” Then she shrugged and left the kitchen.

Leaving Jack standing there, breathing a little too hard. It wasn’t concern that Carlyle knew he had a more-than-working relationship with Chloe. He’d had a bad feeling for a while that Carlyle had some inkling of what was going on between them. But she’d never come out and said anything, and Carlyle wasn’t exactlysubtle.

It was Mary’s words about love. Carlyle’s words about unloading on people. It was the oppressive silence in the house, like grief had tightened its ugly chains around the whole ranch once again.

He didn’t want it to. That first year after losing his parents had been the hardest damn year of his life—all their lives—and he didn’t want it touching any of his siblings again. Ever again.

But here it was, and he couldn’t seem to breathe. Couldn’t seem to find a solution. No amount of keeping them separate from the realities seemed to change what they were all feeling internally.

Sad and shaken and quiet.

Except there was something else inside him. A tightening in his chest, a struggle to breathe. The pressure of seventeen years beating down on him, like someone pounding a stake into the ground, and he was the stake.

He was half-afraid he was having some kind of cardiac event, but there was no shooting pain in his arm. No losing consciousness. Just this overwhelmingpressure—worse but not all that different from when things went off-plan.

Panic attack.

To hell with that. Just to hell with it. He strode out of the kitchen, out the back door and toward his truck. Normally, he’d make sure someone knew where he was, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

He had to get out, and even though he wouldn’t admit to himself where he was going, it didn’t surprise him to pull off onto the shoulder of the road that led up to Chloe’s cabin fifteen minutes later.

He didn’t turn into the driveway. He idled on the shoulder, staring at the front door. She likely had Ry in there. She wouldn’t want her brother staying out at the ranch when he was unpredictable, and likely there was some police presence still. So this was a pointless endeavor. He wasn’t going inside. He wasn’t going to use her like some kind of crutch.

He did just fine on his own. Had for sixteen years. He’d finished raising a family. He’d built a business, been a cop, become sheriff. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t control. All on his own.

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