Rachel’s heart sank to her knees. She’d forgotten about the big group send-off.

When they noticed Ben’s truck pulling into the yard, everyone clapped and cheered. Rachel cursed under her breath and replaced her hat on her head.

“There’s our cowgirl,” Jenna said in a perky voice.

“Here I am.” She forced a smile as she leapt over the side of the truck bed. “I need to have a word with you, Jenna, Amy.”

Amy looked at her like she’d lost her marbles. “Now?”

“Right now.”

She stalked toward the stable, her sisters in tow, then slid the door closed behind them.

“Now’s not the best time, Rach,” Amy said. “We’ve got a yard full of people.”

“I know that. Which is why we need them to leave. Now! Is Mr. Dixon driving them to the airport?”

Jenna waved her arms. “Hold on. What are you talking about?”

Rachel opened her mouth, but the sound of sirens approaching cut through the air.

“Ben and I had no choice but to call the cops. We found something bad out on the west end field. Another one of Dad’s secrets.”

Jenna and Amy nodded, getting enough of the point to spur them to action. They pushed past Rachel and threw the door open as a fire engine and three squad cars barreled into the yard. Rachel had trouble getting her legs to work. Her eyes turned up to look at the space above the door.

Her lucky horseshoe.

Another illusion she’d held on to for too long.

She couldn’t stand the thought of leaving it there one moment longer to gloat at her. She banged the stable’s tool closet door open and found a tire iron. Maybe she’d take the shoe to her father’s grave and bury it right alongside her false memories of the man she’d idolized. Then again, that would be too much effort expended on the man who obviously hadn’t loved her all that much.

Three pries with the tire iron and the nails gave way. The shoe flipped from the wall and sailed over Rachel’s head to fall into the scoop she used to muck out the stalls. A fitting end for a rotten lie of a story.

Cursing loudly, she tossed the tire iron aside. It clattered to the ground as she marched from the stable, ready to face her new reality.

* * *

It took the sheriff deputies and firefighters a solid eight hours to assess and process the new crime scene on Rachel’s farm. Ben had been right—what they’d found was indeed a meth lab. Undersheriff Stratis and Deputy Binderman estimated it’d been used as recently as the previous winter. Right about the time the oil derricks were installed.

The timing baffled Rachel as much as it seemed to baffle the sheriff deputies. She would’ve figured it’d gone out of use at the time of her dad’s car crash, which the sheriff’s department was no longer calling an accident. When she pressed for details, all they would tell her was that the case had been reopened due to new evidence.

As if Rachel and her sisters could handle any more tough news.

Then again, if her dad had gotten himself killed, she’d bet the house it had something to do with the drugs. There wasn’t a drug dealer or cooker on the planet who ever died of natural causes, that was for sure.

The whole day long, she kept her eyes open for a sign of Vaughn, but he never showed up. Not to her farm, and not to the station house, where she’d followed Stratis’s squad car for a more formal interview in the late afternoon. She’d been certain he’d at least want to make sure she was okay, but his silence broke her heart all over again.

Her interview with Stratis at the station house was free of the unpleasant tension and innuendos of wrongdoing that had plagued their first interview. Probably because Rachel was too far mired in her pain to care, but also because Stratis was all business. His features and words were wooden, his demeanor stoic. All the questions he’d asked her earlier, he asked again, along with a dozen more. Questions mostly about her dad’s last few years of life. She answered the best she could, but nothing about her memories of her dad seemed real anymore.

He never once brought up Vaughn. None of the deputies did, for that matter. Save for the name plaque on his office door, it was as though he’d ceased to exist.

When Stratis released Rachel at a few minutes to five o’clock, she nearly stopped by Irene’s desk to ask after Vaughn’s whereabouts. She simply couldn’t reconcile the idea that he’d heard about what she was going through and had chosen not to check on her. But Stratis was on her heels, walking her to the front door, so she kept moving.

In the parking lot, she climbed into her stuffy truck and rolled the windows down. She sat, at a loss of where to go or what to do. What she really needed was wide-open space, but the places she’d always found solace in reminded her of her father. If she went to her house, she’d have to deal with her sisters, and she didn’t have the strength for that yet.

She started the truck’s engine and cruised down the main road. Old habits died hard; and she couldn’t help but scan for Vaughn’s truck or squad car in every parking lot she passed. Three blocks down, Smithy’s Bar came into view. No evidence of Vaughn in the lot, but she turned in to the parking area anyway.

She needed the company of Catcher Creek locals like she needed a hole in the head, but a cold beer might be nice. And Smithy’s had a pay phone out back if she worked up enough courage to call Vaughn out on his neglect of her.

The air inside the bar was cool and smelled of cleaning products and spilled beer. A Merle Haggard song poured from the jukebox in the dark corner to her left. The place was crowded, being after normal workday hours on a Friday. Rachel squeezed onto a bar stool between two older men she didn’t recognize, hoping no one would bother to notice her except Gloria, the bartender.

After a few minutes, Gloria worked her way and sailed a cardboard coaster in front of her. “The usual, hon?”

“That’ll do. Thanks.”

She tapped the coaster on its side against the bar and kept her head down while she waited, hoping to avoid catching anyone’s eye.

Gloria returned with a bottle of beer, but instead of setting it down and leaving, she lingered. “Surprised to see you here, Rachel.”

Rachel set her hand on the cold glass bottle and looked at Gloria’s overdone face and bouncy, peroxide blond hair.

“Why’s that?” Rachel asked, too grumpy for small talk.

Gloria arched one of her drawn-in brows. “Because of what happened today with Sheriff Cooper’s family. We all figured you’d be consoling him. Are you two on the outs?”

Rachel sat up straighter. “What happened to his family? Is someone hurt?”

“Only their pride,” Gloria said.

“Tell me what happened. Please. I didn’t know.”

She got a saucy twinkle in her eye that turned Rachel’s stomach. “Early this morning, the Tucumcari police raided his parents’ house. It was all over the news. They arrested his sister and both his parents on shoplifting and drug charges.”

Gossip like that was too horrific to be true. Even still, her hand itched with the urge to slap Gloria, she sounded so gleeful at the revelation. “That can’t be right.”

Then she thought about Vaughn’s contentious rivalry with Chief Meyer and the possibility didn’t seem so outlandish.

“My cousin lives on his parents’ block,” Gloria said. “She told me the sheriff had to be restrained when they took his mother away in cuffs.”

Oh, hell. Lightheaded and entertaining the possibility of being sick to her stomach, she pushed off the stool.

“That’s enough, Gloria.”

Rachel whipped her head around to see Kate Parrish standing, her arms crossed over her chest, her expression livid.

“Is Gloria right? Vaughn’s parents . . .”

Kate nodded.

“Told you,” Gloria said.

Refusing to look in Gloria’s direction, Rachel reached into her front pocket for her coin purse. Every cell in her body screamed with the need to get to him, to throw her arms around him, and forget the cruel world they lived in.

Kate set her hand on Rachel’s arm. “I’ve got your beer. Go to him.”

Rachel searched Kate’s expression, expecting malice, but saw only the friend Kate had always been to her before that week. “Why would you help me?”

Remorse flickered across her features. “Jealousy is a funny beast, you know?” She nodded toward the door with a sad smile. “Get out of here.”

“Thank you.” She took off in a fast walk for the door. She’d have to process Kate’s turn-of-mood some other time. Right now, her mind didn’t have room for anything else but Vaughn.

She parked across the street from his house and shut the engine down. His truck sat at the curb, his patrol car in the driveway. Now that she was here, she was chickening out. Maybe he didn’t want to see her. She wasn’t sure she could bear that. The only thing she ever had that was all hers was Vaughn, and their damaged, pain-filled connection to each other. If he turned her away, she wouldn’t have anything left in the world to hold on to.

The blinds in his exercise room were closed, but with the falling shadows of late afternoon, a faint glow of light was visible behind the blinds. The metal knocker on the blue front door was rusty and falling apart, but he’d explained to her that he’d never replace it because his parents had gifted him with it when he bought the place. It had been the door knocker on his grandparents’ Texas farm. His work boots sat on the porch, and she could just make out the stuffing in his roof from the sparrows that wintered there, and that he didn’t have the heart to evict. Outgoing mail had been clipped to the front of his mailbox with a clothespin.