True Colors

“Thanks.” Winona took off her coat and went back toward the sunroom.

He sat stiff-backed in the antique white wicker chair by the French doors, with his boots firmly planted on the floor. His gnarled, bony fingers lay splayed on his jean-clad thighs; there was the telltale tremble in his hand. His white hair was thin and unkempt-looking beneath his brown, sweat-stained cowboy hat, and even in profile she could see the tension in his jaw.

“Hello, Dad,” she said, coming forward.

He pulled his hat off and set it on his lap, pushing a hand through his hair. “You got to stop this, Winona.”

She sat down on the plush sofa opposite him and knew this was her chance to make him understand. “What if we were wrong?”

“We ain’t.”

“Maybe we were.”

“Drop it, Winona. People are talking.”

Winona got to her feet. “That would be what you care about. The great Grey family and our precious reputation. You’d rather have an innocent man rot in prison than admit to making a mistake. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You never have.”

He got to his feet in the gradual, rickety way that had become normal for him, but there was nothing frail in his eyes. The look he gave her was cold and dark. “Don’t you talk to me that way.”

“No. Don’t you talk to me that way.” She almost laughed, but was afraid it would sound hysterical. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to hear you say you were proud of me?” Her voice trembled on that, caught on the sharp point of a need that began a lifetime ago, almost before she could remember. “But that’s never going to happen, is it? And you know what? I don’t care anymore. I’m doing the right thing with Dallas, and if I discover I’m wrong, I’ll live with it, but I won’t spend the rest of my life thinking I made a mistake that mattered.”

On that, she turned and walked out of her sunroom and went upstairs to her bedroom. There, she went to the window and stared out, watching her father make his slow, shuffling way out to the sidewalk toward his truck. Without even a backward glance, he drove away.

Chapter Twenty-seven

The late winter and early spring of 2008 was one of the wettest on record in Oyster Shores. Rain fell almost constantly from mid-February to late March, turning the ground into a spongy, muddy mass of green and brown.

Winona’s life had changed so much in the last five months that it often felt unrecognizable. Fighting an unspoken battle had had unforeseen consequences.

It made no sense to her. To her mind, she was so clearly doing the right thing that any other view was ridiculous. Quite simply, if there was even the smallest hope that a mistake had been made with Dallas, it needed to be explored. How could the people she’d lived among for all of her life not see that?

There was support for her efforts, to be sure, but most of it was voiced quietly. Aurora and Noah were her front line; her foot soldiers in this battle. Vivi Ann was neither fully in nor fully out; that was one of the worst things about this quest. The tiny flicker of hope had burned her sister to the bone and left her once again lethargic and a little numb.

And Dad was just plain pissed off. He considered Winona’s efforts a public embarrassment. Just last week in the Eagles Hall he’d been heard to say, “She’s always needed to be in the spotlight, that girl. You’d think she’d put her family first.”

That had hurt most of all, since she was doing all of this for Vivi Ann and Noah, and at night, when she lay in her bed, emptier somehow without Mark than it had been before, she knew her desire to free Dallas was about redemption. For all of them, perhaps; her most of all.

And so she sucked it up. She accepted that many of her friends and neighbors disagreed with her choice, that her father despised it, and that Vivi Ann was frightened by it. These were the burdens Winona willingly carried as she waited for the court’s response.

By April, though, the waiting had grown difficult. She’d lost clients and often spent whole days in Seattle, researching at the University of Washington’s law library.

On Thursday, the third of April, she worked in Seattle all day and drove home slowly, in no real hurry to arrive. She passed her beach house with barely a glance at the FOR RENT sign. Since the breakup with Mark, she spent most of her time at her house in town; to be honest, it was too difficult to be so close to him and not see him.

Instead of turning into her own driveway, she headed for Water’s Edge. She was tired of being alone.

For a moment, when she stepped out of her car, it wasn’t raining, and the beauty of this place in sunlight hit Winona anew. The fields were lush as green felt, the fences had all recently been painted black, and the trees along the driveway—Dallas’s trees—were in full cotton-candy-pink bloom. A few errant blossoms floated on the air around them. Success had come to this ranch in the past decade and with that success came much-needed repairs. Everything, every building, was now well maintained. The parking area was a huge patch of jet-black asphalt; usually it was full of trucks and trailers, but just now, in the late afternoon pause between day and night, the place looked empty.

Winona walked toward the light she saw on in the barn.

Vivi Ann was alone in the arena, struggling with a big yellow barrel, rolling it awkwardly into position.

Winona stepped into the light-as-air dirt and called out, “Hey. You need some help with that?”

“Stay there. You’ll ruin your shoes.” Vivi Ann muscled the barrel into its place at the peak of an imaginary triangle, then wiped the dirt from her gloves and headed toward Winona. In the pale light—dimmed by dirt on dozens of overhead bulbs—she looked both immensely tired and inexpressibly beautiful. The years had taken a toll on Vivi Ann, made her leaner and hollowed out her face, but even the crow’s-feet around her eyes couldn’t deface her beauty. She was one of those women like Audrey Hepburn or Helen Mirren who would be a beauty at every age. Once, that would have made Winona jealous; but now she saw more than the perfection of her sister’s face: she saw the pain in those green eyes.

“Barrel-racing practice tonight?” Winona said.

“Every Thursday for fifteen years.” Vivi Ann pulled off her brown leather work gloves and tucked them in her belt.