“I didn’t know that,” he said finally. “But I still think he’s guilty.”
“That makes sense. He probably is. But if someone you trusted asked you to consider the alternative—”
She let the words hang in the air.
Keith said, “I don’t... I don’t really have anybody like that. Someone I trust like that.”
That deflated her a little. It just sounded so lonely. He really didn’t have anyone, did he?
Martin had taken her under his wing when she’d been a rookie. It sounded like he’d briefly taken Cooper under there, too. The least Gretchen could do was try to pass on the favor.
“Okay. Let’s just say, for right now, that we’ve both been screwing this up. I went too far, and I should have trusted you and told you the truth right from the start. But Keith, you need to get better with the people you meet on the job. Part of being a Marshal is serving the public trust—and you’ve got to be worthy of the public trust. You have to make people feel like they can trust you to treat them fairly and decently.”
“You leave the heat on for them,” Keith said. It was hard to tell whether or not he sounded skeptical.
“Yeah. Little things like that. You leave the heat on. You’re polite as long as they’re polite.” She patted his arm. “Give it a try, anyway. You’re new enough on the job that you can afford to try out different ways of doing things before you settle into your own pattern.”
“I don’t want to mess this up,” Keith said. His voice was low and intense. “My whole family is counting on me.”
She knew how that felt, more or less. Or at least she knew how it felt to feel the weight of expectations on her shoulders, to feel like she had to achieve more than everyone else and do it faster than everyone else, to make up for the fact that she was different. Trying to be perfect—even perfect at being normal—was stressful.
No wonder she didn’t mind long car trips. They were a vacation from the pressure she put on herself at home.
“No one’s talking to your family,” Gretchen reassured Keith. “Martin’s not turning in an evaluation to them at the end of every week. There’s no all-unicorn bulletin going out on you. You’ve got time to figure things out.”
He exhaled, his breath puffing out in a white cloud. He looked as stubborn as ever, but he said, “I’ll think about what you said.”
She kind of liked that that was all he was promising. It would have been easy for him to promise her he’d change completely, but he was trying instead to make her only the promise he knew he could keep. It made her think that he took his word seriously.
Maybe he was a pain in the ass, but he wasn’t just a pain in the ass. And maybe, like Martin had said, he could grow out of it.
“Okay. Good.” She grinned at him. “I’m going to see if Dawes wants a snack.”
“Now you’re just doing this on purpose,” Keith said.
“Little bit,” Gretchen admitted cheerfully.
For a second there, she would have sworn Keith almost smiled.
Truth be told, she did like having a flimsy excuse to be extra-nice to Cooper. She didn’t know what to make of that. But as long as she paid attention to what that desire was making her do, and as long as she made sure it stayed on the right side of the stupidity line—unlike that handshake—then she didn’t see the harm in it.
Though maybe that was just because she didn’t want to.
She ducked back into the car for a second, the warm blast from the heater hitting her smack in the face while the rest of her was still outside in the cold.
“Do you want anything from inside? Drink, candy bar?”
He stared at her like she was some kind of beautiful natural phenomenon, like the northern lights or the ocean at sunrise.
It took her breath away. Their eyes seemed to lock together, like two magnets clicking into place.
She knew he had beautiful eyes—a clear, lagoon-like green—but this was ridiculous. How she was feeling was ridiculous.
And right, a little voice in her head said. This is the rightest you’ve felt in a long time.
Gretchen did her best to ignore it. That was what she was supposed to do with her secret voice, wasn’t it? That was the little voice