to make any sort of long-term commitment.
He was sure she loved him—her body had told him things she wouldn’t or couldn’t put into words—but that didn’t mean she trusted him. And without trust, without respect, love just wasn’t enough, no matter how strong it was.
So he had to wait. Bide his time.
And that was going to be just about the hardest thing he’d ever done.
The carnival was shutting down when he drove by the fairgrounds a few minutes later, the rodeo arena was dark, the vendors outside the exhibition hall loading up what they hadn’t sold over the weekend.
It all made him feel lonely, as though a small, special world had opened, just for that brief time, and was now closing again. Shutting him out.
He might have gone to the Boot Scoot for a beer and maybe a game of pool, just to get his mind off things, but it was always closed on Sundays. Even the Butter Biscuit locked up and went dark once the after-church rush was over.
He turned his thoughts to Boone and the sorry situation he’d gotten himself into by letting go of his kids after Corrie died. Hutch started thinking about fear, and what it did to people. What it cost them.
It was a short leap, of course, from his friend’s worries about being able to take proper care of a couple of growing boys to the things, he, Hutch, was afraid of. One of them was commitment—he’d be staking his heart on an uncertain outcome if he got married, and if things went sour, he’d lose half his ranch in the divorce settlement. Whisper Creek was part of him, and without the whole of it, he’d be crippled on the inside.
The other thing he was afraid of was the water tower.
So he drove there, parked in the tall grass, twilight gathering around him, and looked up. The ladder dangled, rickety as ever, from the side, but something was different, too.
Shea, Slade’s teenage stepdaughter, peered down at him, white-faced, from the heights. She appeared to be alone, and a quick glance around confirmed that she had undertaken this rite of passage on her own.
“Hi, Hutch,” she called down, her voice a little shaky.
“What the hell are you doing up there, Shea?” he snapped, in no mood for small talk.
“I’m—not sure,” she replied. “You won’t tell Dad and Joslyn, will you?”
“No promises,” Hutch said. “Get down here, damn it.”
Shea’s voice wavered, and even from that distance, with her face a snow-white oval, he could see that she was crying. “I—can’t. I tried, but I’m too scared.”
Hutch felt the back of his shirt dampen with sweat, and his gut twisted itself into a hard knot. “Come on, Shea,” he went on, more gently now. “You got up there in the first place, didn’t you? That means you can get down.”
“Climbing up wasn’t scary,” she told him. “Climbing down is a whole other matter.”
Hutch swore under his breath, moved closer to the ladder. The rungs were old, some of them missing, others hanging by a single rusty nail.
He knew then what he had to do, but that didn’t mean he wanted to do it. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, because he knew if he looked from side to side, even though he was still standing flat-footed on the ground, he’d feel like he was trying to walk the perimeter of the Tilt-a-Whirl while it was spinning full-throttle.
“Okay,” he heard himself say, as if from a distance. Say, the next county. “Hang on. I’ll come up there, and we’ll climb down together.”
“All—all right,” Shea agreed.
Terror aside, the approach didn’t make a lot of sense to Hutch—Shea probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds, while he tipped the scales at an even one-eighty. Expecting that ladder to hold both of them at the same time was anti-logic, pure and simple.
Still, he’d been where Shea was once. He knew she was frozen with fear, knew she needed another human being within touching distance, someone to be with her, talk her down.
Just as Slade Barlow had once done for him.
He closed his eyes for a moment, sucked in a harsh breath and started up that ladder.
He kept his gaze upward, on Shea’s face as she leaned out over the edge of the flimsy catwalk, looking down at him. Her eyes were enormous and awash in tears.
“Easy now,” he said, addressing himself as much as Shea. “Just take it real easy, sweetheart. You’ll be standing on solid ground