Page 7 of Outlaw Ridge: Griff
He didn’t push. Just said, “Sorry.”
She let out a short breath. “Old baggage. Nothing worth unpacking.”
He didn’t answer right away. His hands tightened slightly on the wheel, and for a second, the truck and the cold and Lily faded. And something else came back sharp and clear.
Hell.
One of those damn flashbacks. A face. Young. Laughing, then gone. Not murdered with a tire iron. Killed in action. In the dirt and heat, a breath stolen mid-sentence. A mistake someone tried to bury with a report.
Griff had learned that day not to take what people told him at face value. Not orders. Not blame. Not truth wrapped in official language.
He blinked once and pushed the memory back where it belonged.
“I understand baggage,” he said finally.
Lily glanced over, curious but not prying.
The road curved gently as they left the last stretch of shops behind and dipped into darker country roads. Only the headlights lit the way now, twin beams cutting through the thick black.
Lily shifted in her seat, arms crossed loosely, eyes forward. “You’re not going to ask me to back off the Bobby Ray case, are you?” she asked.
Griff kept his hands steady on the wheel. “No,” he said. “I’m not backing off it either.”
She turned her head slightly. “I wasn’t fishing for backup.”
“You’ve got it anyway,” he assured her. “No fishing required.”
He glanced over at her, caught the way she was watching him out of the corner of her eye.
“I get pissed when some chicken-shit coward hides in the dark and tries to scare someone into silence,” he said. “That’s not justice. That’s control.”
Her lips tugged into a smile, small and real. But it didn’t last. It faded as quickly as it came, replaced by something heavier. The kind of look someone wore when they’d been carrying a weight for too long, and someone else had finally offered to lift it.
They turned down the last stretch of road toward Lily’s house, the headlights catching the low wooden fence and the edge of a mailbox leaning at a slight angle. Trees loomed on either side, and beyond them, a quiet kind of dark settled in.
Inside the cab, Lily was quiet for a few beats. Then she spoke.
“It probably seems like I’m obsessed with Bobby Ray’s case,” she said.
Griff didn’t answer right away. He could hear the weight in her voice as if this had been sitting on her chest for a while, and she was finally letting a piece of it out.
“I had a lot in common with him,” she went on. “People saw him as trouble from the start. Same way they saw me. He had a mom who was an addict. My parents were alcoholics. Mine just knew how to fake it better.”
Griff glanced over. She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead, her voice even. Controlled. But he’d heard enough around the station. Talk that wasn’t meant to reach her ears. That she’d been neglected on good days. Flat-out abused on the others. Left to fend for herself most of the time.
Yeah, he figured it had a lot to do with why she became a cop. When you grew up in chaos, sometimes all you want is to make sure someone else doesn’t have to.
“You think Bobby Ray got a raw deal because of that?” he asked.
“Sure,” she verified, with zero hesitation. “You’ve seen the file. That evidence was strong. Not clean, not perfect, but strong. But even if they didn’t have it? He would’ve been convicted.”
“Because of who he was.”
“Because of who they thought he was,” she said quietly. “Because he came from nothing. Because he kept to himself. Because the town already made up its mind before they sat down in that courtroom.”
Griff didn’t say anything right away. But he knew she was right.
In a place like Outlaw Ridge, people carried labels like scars. And once a label stuck, it didn’t matter what the facts said. Some people saw cases. Lily saw people.
