RECKLESS VOWS

What Casey Knows

The office door swung open before Rhett could reach it, and for one long, suspended second none of us moved, the three of us caught in the kind of silence that comes right before something breaks.

Casey stood in the frame with a wrench in one hand and grease smudged along her jaw, and the look on her face made it clear she'd expected trouble, just not this particular kind, not me standing in the middle of her family's garage like I had every right to be there.

"Put the gun away," she said, dry as dust, like this was simply Tuesday. "It's me."

Rhett didn't lower it right away, and something about the care he took, checking her over before he trusted the room, told me more about the danger circling this town than anything Doyle's file had ever printed. "You're supposed to be home."

"Forgot the deposit bag." Her eyes found me and stayed there, unhurried, moving over my jacket, my boots, the careful way I'd folded my arms across my chest like I could hold myself together through sheer will. Whatever she saw, she didn't like it. "Didn't realize we were entertaining guests tonight."

Heat crawled up my neck, the old familiar shame of being sixteen and caught somewhere I shouldn't be, and I hated how easily this town could still do that to me after everything I'd built for myself since I left. "That's between me and Rhett."

"Everything used to be between you and Rhett." She said it without raising her voice, which somehow made it land harder, each word deliberate, like she'd rehearsed this in front of a mirror on more than one lonely night. "Then Eli died, and you left him standing alone at a funeral, in front of the whole town, without so much as a goodbye to me either. So forgive me if I don't exactly roll out the welcome mat."

"Casey." Rhett said her name low, almost gentle, and I watched something in her posture give way at the sound of it, her shoulders dropping half an inch, the fight bleeding out of her the way steam escapes a kettle the moment it's pulled from the heat. She grabbed the canvas bag off the desk without looking at either of us again, and at the door she paused, one hand on the frame, her back still turned.

"I remember him too," she said quietly. "In case anybody in this room forgot that part."

The door shut behind her.

Outside, her truck started, tires spitting gravel into the dark, and then there was nothing left but the hum of the shop lights and the strange, charged quiet of standing this close to a man I had spent eight years trying not to think about, in a room that still smelled like motor oil and rain, exactly the way I remembered it smelling the last time he'd kissed me against that very wall.

"She's not wrong," I said.

"She's not entirely right either." Rhett set the pistol down on the workbench, safety first, the motion so practiced it barely registered as dangerous.

When he finally looked at me, there was something worn and tired underneath the usual guardedness, something the daylight hadn't let me see. "Casey was fourteen when Eli died. She followed him around this garage begging him to teach her to weld until he finally gave in and burned a hole clean through her jeans. She's spent eight years deciding who to blame for losing him, and tonight you were standing close enough to be it."

"I'm not asking anyone to forgive me."

"Good. Because it isn't on offer."

He pulled two stools out from beneath the far workbench, patted the seat of the closer one, and I found myself sitting before I'd fully decided to, close enough that our knees nearly touched, close enough to smell soap under the grease and something warmer underneath both, something that was simply him, unchanged by eight years or three states or every reason I'd told myself I was over this.

"Ask," he said.

I had rehearsed this moment for so long the questions had worn smooth in my mouth, careful and lawyerly, built to hold up under cross-examination. Sitting three feet from him now, watching the low light catch the lines at the corners of his eyes, every version I'd practiced sounded small and cowardly compared to what I actually needed to know.

"Were you with him that night?"

"Part of it." His hands, scarred and rough, folded together on his knee, and I found myself staring at them instead of his face, remembering exactly how they used to feel against my skin, warm and careful even when the rest of him was reckless. "We were out back of the clubhouse until almost midnight. He kept dropping the bike on the same turn, laughing every time he picked himself up. Wanted to impress somebody. Wouldn't tell me who, no matter how many times I asked."

"Then what happened?"

"Then he said he had somewhere to be, and I let him go."

"Alone."

"Alone." The word cost him visibly, his jaw working before the sound made it out. "I've replayed that decision every single day for eight years, Wren. There isn't a version where I stop him that doesn't also mean I never see this town again. Or you."

The last two words hung there, quiet and dangerous, and I felt them land somewhere low in my chest, somewhere I hadn't let anyone touch in a very long time.

"The report says he died at the mill," I said, pushing past it before I did something foolish like reach for his hand. "Not on the road."

Something shifted behind his eyes, a stillness that wasn't peace so much as calculation, a man deciding exactly how much truth he could afford to hand me.

"What," I pressed.

"Nothing you're ready for tonight."

"Rhett."

"I've told you what I know." He stood, putting distance between us like the stool had suddenly gone too warm to sit on, and I felt the loss of his heat like a physical thing. "The rest, you're going to have to earn with trust before I hand it over. Not the other way around. That's how this has to work now, if it's going to work at all."

"That's not how evidence works."

"This isn't evidence." His voice dropped, rough at the edges. "This is my life, Wren. And you're the only person I've ever wanted to give it to."

My phone buzzed before I could answer that, and I nearly let it ring itself out. Then I saw Doyle's name light the screen and pulled it free on pure instinct, the way you flinch at a sound before you understand where it came from.

Doyle: Tell Calloway I said hello.

I stared at the letters until they blurred, my stomach dropping through the floor.

"What is it," Rhett asked, reading the change in my face before I could hide it.

I turned the screen toward him. His expression barely moved, but his hand found the edge of the workbench and gripped it hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

"How would he know I was here," I whispered, more to myself than him. "I didn't call the motel. I never checked in with anyone."

"Rhett," I said again, my voice thinner now, "is there a camera on this building that isn't yours?"

He was already crossing to the light switch.

"Get down," he said, and the whole garage went black around us, his hand finding mine in

the dark before I even reached for him.