Page 35 of Playing Dirty
We retrieved the cam just before dawn, quiet as ghosts. The house across the street was still and dark, and the barn was just as empty as when we left it. No signs we’d ever been there. No one was watching. No alarms. No one bothered to notice.
Back in the truck, I tucked the camera case between my boots and stared out the windshield as Sawyer turned onto the highway and headed north toward Lovelace. The sun was starting to smear the horizon with pink, like the sky didn’t know what kind of day it wanted to be yet.
Neither did I.
We drove for a long while without speaking. It was a silence that didn’t need filling, the kind that said:we both know what we saw,andwe both know what happens next.
Eventually, I cleared my throat. “I’m the one who tells her.”
Sawyer didn’t glance away from the road. “Yeah?”
“She deserves to hear it from someone who doesn’t want to see her break.” I flexed my hand on my knee. “Better me than someone who’d enjoy it.”
He nodded, slow and steady, but didn’t say anything right away. When he did, his voice was even. Measured.
“You don’t know how she’ll take it.”
“I know she’ll be hurt.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t do it alone.”
I looked over at him.
“Tessa,” he said. “Colt, maybe. People she trusts. People who’ll have her back when you show her that video.”
I hated that he was right.
But he was.
I rubbed a hand over my jaw, thinking it through. “You should be there too,” I said. “To tell her what you saw. In the store. Straight from you—not just secondhand from me.”
Sawyer gave a slight nod. “Yeah. I can do that.”
Still, I couldn’t let anyone else hold the detonator. “Fine,” I said. “You can all be there. But it’s me who shows her. Me who says the words.”
“Fair enough.”
I turned my eyes back to the road. We mused about car shows and gun collections as the miles of cracked asphalt stretched ahead of us. Lovelace was waiting on the other end like a town full of matches.
No part of this was going to be clean.
But someone had to stand there when the bomb went off.
Might as well be me.
Chapter Ten
The Distance Between Us
Callie
Ididn’t mean to look for the second time.
But as I curved down the last stretch of road, I couldn’t stop myself from glancing back at Rhett’s place in the rearview mirror one more time. Still dark. Still empty. Like it had been swallowed by the night and wasn’t in any hurry to reappear.
The ache in my chest wasn’t sharp—it was dull and constant, like something had settled there just to remind me I hadn’t figured out how to let go. Not of him. Not of anything.
The radio crackled to life as I fiddled with the volume, the local DJ cutting through my thoughts.“And good news for folks up on the north ridge—power’s finally been restored after the storm. Looks like everything’s running again, just in time for another cold snap this weekend…”
