it had transitioned to the two of them intentionally riding together, but it had. And he didn’t mind.
She was a funny thing, this woman.
This woman who represented so many things he didn’t like. An adversary in many ways who had been gouged by life. Who’d had things stolen from her the same as he had.
He’d lost four years of his life. Had never had parents who’d cared about him. She had lost the sense that life was safe and certain when she was just a girl.
They were completely different people. At cross-purposes half the time. But they both knew what life could take from you.
They were both there, living proof that no matter where you started, you weren’t necessarily safe.
Not the most comforting of realizations, at least not for some people.
West found it oddly comforting. Life was going to do what it did. His response was to just keep saddling up.
As they wound their way up the trail, he saw a tree that had been scratched bald. He stopped and stared at it for a moment. “Is that just a rub?” he asked, meaning a spot where male deer went to scrape the velvet off their antlers during a particular time of year.
“It doesn’t look like one,” she said.
“Weird,” he commented. His eyes went past the tree, to a space just off the trail. There, he saw a bag full of trash, and what looked like a fire ring. “Looks like I’ve had a camper.”
“Looks like,” she said. Her horse pranced in place, and Pansy tugged on the reins, keeping her locked in place. “My sister was telling me that my brother thought someone was in our barn the other night. Considering all the things that have been going on lately, this is a little bit strange.”
“Guess so,” he commented.
“There was a break-in at Buttercloud.”
“Buttercloud?”
“It’s a bakery.”
“Okay,” he said.
She got off her horse and went toward the fire ring. It was the bag of trash she took hold of, opening the top of it and looking inside. “There is in fact a bread bag from Buttercloud here.”
“So your bread thief has been here.”
“It would seem so.” She sighed heavily. “Probably a drifter. And with any luck, he’ll move on soon.”
“You think so?”
“I mean, if I were not tied to any one place, and I was in the position where I had to steal to get food, yes, I would move quickly. I wouldn’t want to linger and keep stealing from the same place, because then you’re at risk of the police actually finding out who you are.
“I’m going to take this,” she said.
“The bag of trash?”
“It’s evidence.”
“I guess it is.”
“Just more of me trying to do the right thing,” she said dryly. “Building up my defenses against life.”
“Life doesn’t care,” he said, flashing her a grin. “I keep hoping it might start to.”
She got back on her horse, and they turned around, heading back toward their houses.
He looked at the stubborn line of her jaw, the straight set of her shoulders. She was tough, this woman. Even out on a trail ride, she had stumbled on something she had to inventory.
“What’s it like to be a police officer where you grew up?”
He didn’t even like to go back to Sweet Home as a regular citizen. Too many people knew him, remembered him being a troubled kid. There was too much baggage for his liking.
And then, when Dallas had gotten to be the same he had left there too.
She had been here all of her life, as far as he could tell.
“Complicated,” she said.
“But you do it anyway.”
“I want to be police chief,” she said. “I want to... I owe it to my dad’s memory.”
He wasn’t going to argue with her. Both of his parents were alive, but when they weren’t he didn’t think he would feel inclined to do anything in their memory. Since they hadn’t done much for him in his life. He couldn’t argue with that kind of loyalty. If anything, he envied it.
“Do you think you would have wanted to do anything else?”
“No,” she said, in that same stubborn tone. “I think this is who I was meant to be. You can’t ask what-if about things like this. You’ll go crazy. Because then you start asking questions like what if the plane had left five minutes later? Or the day before? Or not at all? You start... You start seeing everything as a little bit too much of a coin toss. And it makes you too scared