Page 120 of Trigger Happy

“Where’s Lawton?” I ask, though I can already feel the answer bruising my heart. It’s all there in the imprints he left behind.

I head to my nightstand and jerk open the drawer, searching for the Polaroid I kept of us at the rodeo, but it’s not there.

Arch clinks his beer down on the coffee table, meeting my eyes. “He’s gone.”

57Lawton

Grief, just when you think you’ve got it under control, it slams into you or slaps you around a little. It can creep up on you too. Really, grief does whatever it damn well wants.

And right now, it’s biting me in the ass.

She killed him, and there aren’t enough habanero beef jerky sticks in this world to make this right. I don’t want to look at her beautiful face again. Don’t want to remember how it sounded when she laughed at my jokes, either.

I speed down some backroad in Utah. Am I tempting fate by driving over a hundred miles an hour one-handed? Yeah, I wish. But if you can shoot one-handed, you can drive.

What I really want is that limoncello bottle, but if I drink, she wins. There’s beef jerky she left in the glove box of my rental truck, though, so I tear into it and chew, even though I’m not hungry. As I chew, I wonder just how much it would hurt to drive this truck off the mountain.

A lot, I bet.

Bet it would feel good too, not to feel anything.

That’s what has me slamming on the brakes and pulling over. I need a minute. Once I’m stopped on the shoulder, I pull out the Polaroid of us from the rodeo. Sabrina’s looking at me like she…

“No,” I mutter. “Not gonna think about that.”

I’m tempted to crush it between my hands, shred it into pieces, and I’m about ready to when my phone buzzes.

WIFEY

Please, Lawton. Just talk to me. I’ll explain everything.

It feels like a bomb goes off in my chest.

“Oh yeah?” I mutter to no one. “You want to explain? Do you want to go over the exact ninety-degree angle you sliced his throat at?”

I pull up her contact and change her name to DON’T FUCKING RESPOND, but then I decide my self-control is trash, so I block her instead. Even that’s not good enough, so I chuck my phone out the window, aiming for the lake off the shoulder.

But I tuck the Polaroid in my back pocket.

Ma was right. I should’ve known better than to trust a Chastain.

58Sabrina

Lawton blocked me.

At the very least, I expected a middle finger emoji. I don’t know where he is or how to contact him, and I’m not an analog peasant, so I refuse to write him a letter explaining the situation.

If it got lost in the mail, that’s incriminating evidence.

I’m running out of options, so I stay at the barn for the next week, hoping he’ll be back to get his cowboy boots since they’re his favorite. He had the soles restored five times, so I make sure to keep the leather oiled for him. All week I stuff myself with Maple Bacon Glazers, Lawton’s favorite, deep clean the barn at three a.m., and reorganize my fake IDs by state, all while checking my phone every twenty seconds to see if Lawton miraculously decided to unblock me (he doesn’t) or respond to one of my million texts (he hasn’t).

I can’t sleep, either. Every time I close my eyes, I picture that wrecked look on his face as he held the knife to my throat. Part of me wonders if it’s better to let him hate me instead of ruining the memory of his brother, but before, I was okay with him hating me.

I’m not anymore. I need to make this right.

When Bobbi finds me sniffling over a pumpkin spice latte, mumbling it was his favorite, she drags me out of the barn, saying she knows “just the thing” to make me feel better.

That’s how we end up burying Ella Payne at midnight in the woods. Bobbi decided she needed a proper funeral, and I can’t disagree, so here we are.