It was almost too much for her to stand.
But the little voice—the one that she had, until today, thought she’d lost for good—said incredulously, Too much for you to stand? This is what we were meant for! Screw moderation! Let’s have some excess here. Let’s go to the extremes we’ve been hiding from our whole life.
Cooper would definitely be an extreme. And he would be a very, very risky indulgence, even if she only indulged in the privacy of her own thoughts. She couldn’t afford that. With an inner sigh of reluctance, she twisted down some invisible volume knob, silencing the voice once more.
“The black car,” she said. Talking about professional matters. Because she was a professional.
Cooper nodded. “You said the car you saw at the gas station was the same one that rear-ended us. I believe you.”
“Even though the color was different?”
“If I saw a chameleon in two places, its colors would be different too,” Cooper pointed out. “And if I didn’t know how chameleons worked, I’d think it was impossible for it to be the same thing. And actually, I don’t know how chameleons work, I just trust all the biologists who figured it out. And I trust you more than a lot of biologists I’ve never met.”
It was the sweetest, strangest declaration of trust she’d ever heard, and she loved it.
It seemed like it was a lot easier for him to trust her than it was for her to trust herself.
“Something happened back at the gas station,” Cooper continued. “After you talked to whoever was in that car, you were off your game.”
She had been, and he had been the one to notice and care. Keith had been more worried about drawing the proper line in the sand to preserve their authority, and she had been too anxious to repress what had just happened to dive into it the way she had known, even then, that she needed to.
Maybe her instincts were right, and maybe they weren’t. But letting fear take the wheel sure as hell didn’t help.
She could guess the general outline of what had happened at the gas station, and if it hurt to think about it, well, tough. She wasn’t going to play it safe with her own feelings anymore. The price was too steep.
“You’re right,” Gretchen said. “Something did happen back there. Something weird.”
It was strangely hard to trace her way back through her memories. It was like she was watching a video, and the footage went staticky and pixelated as soon as she started approaching the black car. Everything was muddled and blurred, and the driver of the black car had used her sense of shame and embarrassment to get her to avoid looking too closely at what she could remember.
Despite her good intentions, it was hard to cast those feelings aside just because she wanted to.
But she had to do it. Cooper needed her to. His life had been at stake. He was the one the men had been shooting at. He was the one they’d hunted all the way from the prison yard at Stridmont.
“I thought the car looked suspicious,” Gretchen said. She spoke slowly, feeling like she was making her way through a dark maze with one hand always planted against the wall so she didn’t get too lost. “Black cars aren’t unusual, tinted windows aren’t unusual, but—it was just sitting there, still running, and it had been there as long as we had, on a day when the cashier inside had said she wasn’t getting many customers because of the weather. I had a bad feeling about it. I wanted to just... check it out.”
“Smart. It’s what I would have done.”
That she was pleased by that assessment was one more sign that she’d flipped completely over to believing he was innocent. There was no way the approval of a disgraced, disloyal Marshal would have made her that happy.
That was something to keep in mind.
“The driver didn’t want to roll the window down, not at first. I had to knock a couple times. That’s unusual, because the car was running and I obviously knew they were in there. Most people won’t just ignore you when they can’t actually hide.”
“But he did finally roll it down, right? Did you get a good look at him?”
“I must have.” She let out a short, humorless laugh. “Just like I must have gotten a good look at our two shooters earlier. I have 20/20 vision, and both times, I was looking in the right direction. But I don’t remember anything. That’s weird too, because I’m usually good with faces, and we’re all trained to be better at that than most people anyway. But with these guys—nothing. They might as well have been ghosts.”
Eyes. Something about the driver’s eyes.
But what about the driver’s eyes? She didn’t know.
“The driver told me not to worry about any of it. He...”
Peered inside my brain. Found out everything that makes me feel squirmy and insecure.
She hated admitting to that kind of weakness, but she needed to be honest with him. They weren’t going to figure any of this out if they kept secrets from each other.
“It was like he knew what I was thinking. He knew how he could convince me that I was overreacting, that I shouldn’t trust myself.”