“Baby, I know this.”
“Right. You do know this. But what you don’t know is that it still scares me to death. Yes, eleven years later I’m still scared that one night you’re going to come home and tell me you’ve decided to follow in your daddy’s footsteps or, worse, you’re not going to come home at all. Then I’m going to have to wonder if you’re buried in a holler somewhere next to everyone else your family didn’t agree with. Men with badges like yours killed Buckley, so I get it. You feel compelled to stop it from happening to Halford, too, but it’s not up to you to save anybody.”
“Baby . . .”
“Let me finish.” She turned to face him. “I’m your wife. I swore to stand by you for better or worse and I don’t take that vow lightly, and believe me, anything that puts us in direct contact with your lunatic brother is the very definition of worse. That being said, you do what you have to do. But hear me, Clayton Burroughs, I will not let some cop, no matter how genuine he is, drag you down a hole you can’t climb out of to help a man who doesn’t want or deserve your help.”
“He’s my brother, Kate.”
“He’s goddamn crazy, is what he is.”
“That doesn’t make him any less my brother. No less my family.”
“I’m your family now. I come first. That’s what you promised me when you put that ring on my finger, and you aren’t getting out of it. Ever. Do you hear me, Sheriff?”
“I hear you, woman.”
Clayton grabbed a handful of T-shirt and pulled her down on top of him. He loved it when she called him Sheriff. He pushed her down on her back and slid himself on top of her. That way, he wouldn’t have to look at the rafters.
CHAPTER
4
KATE BURROUGHS
2015
The digital clock from Clayton’s side of the bed showed 2:15. The glow of the numbers washed the room in a soft orange hue and seeped into Kate’s restless eyelids. Clayton normally covered the clock with a T-shirt or something to block the light, but tonight he hadn’t, and the damn thing always kept Kate awake. She was a light sleeper anyway, not that she would be getting any sleep tonight. Not after the bomb Clayton had just dropped on her. She loved him, of that there was no doubt, but she’d never once claimed to understand him. At what point in your life do you just accept a spade for being a spade and move on? Every time her husband raised a hand to help the people on this mountain he’d had it slapped away, but he always jumped at the chance to try again. It reminded her of the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown to kick. Everyone knows she’s going to snatch it away at the last minute and poor Charlie is going to land flat on his back; even he knows it, but he does it anyway out of sheer faith in the goodness of the world. She’d heard once that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. If that was true, then her husband was insane. Hell, maybe she was, too. After all, this whole lawman thing was her idea.
It was one of those moments in time that sneak up on you from nowhere, without warning or provocation, and change your life forever. She and Clayton had been dating for a little more than a year and he was bound and determined to prove to her, to everyone, that he wasn’t anything like his father. Even so, he still seemed lost. That might have been what initially attracted her to him in the first place. It was clear to her, by the way he cut short conversations about his childhood or took hard left turns whenever the subject came up, that he’d seen, and maybe done, things he wasn’t proud of, and it had changed him, robbed him of the things that make falling in love with a girl across a diner table enjoyable. He always acted like he didn’t deserve the good things in life that other people take for granted. He was broken, and she liked fixing broken things. She didn’t know that about herself then but she knew it now, and this close to forty, she might as well start admitting it. She also knew Clayton would have done anything for her back then. Anything. And that kind of power over a man, in the hands of a twenty-six-year-old woman, could be dangerous. She liked that, too.