Page 84 of The Lovely and the Lost

“No.” I thought my girl was beautiful and wild and strong, and if I could have spent five minutes alone with the person who’d left marks on her, I would have showedhimwhat weakness was.

“Yesterday, when Ness turned that gun on you…” Cady shook her head, her lips pressed into a thin white line. “I just kept thinking that it should have been me.” She paused, then repeated herself. “It should have been me, Kira, and not just then. When you were a kid, growing up in that house, fighting for your life in the forest, the years afterward when you had to fightso hardjust to look people in the eye…it should have been me.” Cady’s voice shook. “There should be a way for a parent to do that for their child, to go through the things that no kid should have to go through, to feel every ounce of that pain so that you feel none.” She let out a ragged breath. “But there’s not. There are things that I can’t protect you from and things that I can’t undo, and it breaks me. It breaks me in ways that I hope you never understand, but I have never—not once, not even for a moment—wanted to protect you because I thought youcouldn’thandle something. I just…” Cady lost her grip on her emotions then. I’d never seen her cry before, and I thought of Jude, deciding that he didn’t need to know about his father if asking hurt her so badly. “I thought you shouldn’thaveto,” Cady said finally. “I thought that maybe once—just once—I could be strong for you.”

“Once?” I asked, the muscles in my chest constricting. “Cady, you’ve been there every day—”

“I’m your mom.” Cady reached out and laid a hand gently against my cheek. “It’s my job.”

I leaned into her touch and thought about Jude saying that she would have taken a bullet for either of us. I thought about how close we’d come to losing each other the day before.

“And speaking of a mother’s job,” Cady said, pulling it together and fixing me with a capital-L Look.“If youeverliterally step into the line of fire again, I will—”

She cut off abruptly, and I realized we had company. Bales came to stand on my other side. “Don’t mind me,” he told Cady mildly. “By all means, try to find an effective way of threatening a fearless child.”

Cady snorted. She wasn’t fearless. Neither was I, but it was clear from her father’s tone that he saw himself as having been in her position more than once.

“I expect you’ll be leaving soon.” There was no judgment whatsoever in Bales Bennett’s tone.

“We will,” Cady said. “Mac is going to come back with us—at least for a little while.” She paused, and the silence stretched out like a canyon between them, until Cady muttered three little words. “You could, too.”

The edges of Bales’s mouth crept upward. Cady’s did the same. She didn’t wait for a verbal response, and her father didn’t offer one as she turned and walked back toward the house.

“You got something to add?” Bales asked me when he noticed me staring at him.

I stuffed my hands into my pockets. “Not a thing.”

He’d spent half a lifetime here, with Ness. Whatever the last months of his life held for her, it wasn’t going to be pretty. Hecouldcome home with us, but as I took in the overwhelming view of the mountain and breathed in the summer air, I wasn’t sure that he would.

“There’s an election coming up,” Bales said after a long moment. “For sheriff.”

I thought of Gabriel, of the way his stepfather had approached Bella’s case, of the thing’s he’d said to me.

“You have a candidate in mind?” I asked Bales.

“One of the FBI agents has family here. Seems to me he’s a bit burned out on the bureau.”

I felt the edges of my lips curve slightly upward. A gentle wind lifted my hair off my shoulders. For several minutes, Bales and I stood there in silence, and then he reached into his back pocket and pulled something out.

A photograph, folded and creased.

“I heard what you said to Ness yesterday—about Ash.” Bales unfolded the picture. He stared at it for a moment, then held it out to me. “Figured you were bluffing.”

I took the picture from him and recognized it as the one Ness had left for us the day before—Cady and Mac and Ash, in their early twenties.

“Funny thing,” Bales continued. “Ash did have a scar that ran from his jaw to his chin—but he didn’t get it until after the three of them started working hand in hand with the military.”

I didn’t follow what the implication of that statement was until I looked down at the photograph in my hand.Cady. Mac. Ash.Looking at it now, I could hear every confession that had crossed Cady’s lips the day before. I couldseeJohn Ashby reaching the extraction point and turning back.

What Icouldn’tsee was a scar in the photograph. No white line slashed across Ash’s jaw.

That’s not possible.

“How did you know?” Bales asked me. “About the scar?”

Suddenly, I was back in the forest, caught in a trap.Girl sees Man. Man helps her. Man always helps her—

In the span between one breath and the next, the memory was gone, and no matter how hard I fought to get it back, I saw nothing but the forest, the wolf, the dark-haired woman’s body on the kitchen floor.

I was bluffing,I thought, my head spinning.I was just trying to distract Ness. I made it up.

So why was it suddenly so hard to breathe?

“Maybe I will take Cady up on that offer,” Bales said, studying my expression. “I’d like to see more of this town of yours—more of your forest.”

Something wet and warm nudged my hand, and I jumped. I looked down to Saskia—loyalandwildandstrong-willedandscarred. I’d never questioned how she’d come to us, who had dumped her on Cady’s property, why her previous owner had finally let her go.

As I sank down next to her, my fingers curling into her fur, her heart beating in tune with mine—I wondered. Wondered who had saved her. Wondered who had delivered her to Cady.

To me.