Adam was right. If Toby’s silence and his leaving Casper had somehow brought trouble to Lusty, then his former alliance had to give way to his current one—which was to this town and this family.
“His name is Beck Conway. He was my training officer, and then he was my partner. My only partner on the force there. He was like a second dad to me, Adam. And I just couldn’t destroy his career, just on my gut feeling and a couple of circumstantial clues.”
“I won’t arouse any suspicion, Toby. But my first priority is keeping this family safe—and that most definitely includes all y’all.”
“That’s my priority now, too. And I trust you to do what’s right and what’s necessary.” He inhaled deeply again, and this time he felt as if a bit of weight had finally been lifted off him. He’d never been the kind of person to sit back and let someone else clean up his mess. He looked over at his partner, and his woman, then turned back to Adam.
“Tell me how I can help.”
Chapter Ten
Mary would never claim to be an expert in a lot of things. She hadn’t pursued a single, narrow discipline in education. The career goal she had in mind wasn’t something as normal as becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. Being normal had never been her plan. Neither would she ever be a woman of great political power, but then, she truly didn’t aspire to be that, either.
Mary Judith Kendall was an author, a weaver of tales that appeared to be created primarily as entertainment. But in order for her to hone her craft, she’d needed to learn about many things. She had it in her heart to create fiction, but that didn’t mean that any of the critical details in her stories were made up. Therefore, she’d taken courses, so many courses, learning new things, but even that wasn’t the main reason she’d put herself in the college environment time after time.
As a result, the one thing she’d learned better than anything else, the one thing she could say with confidence that she knew more about than most of the members of her family, was also the one thing she had not pursued an actual college course in.
That one thing was people. How they thought, their basic and variant psychology. Mary knew how to read people, and mostly, she understood them.
Of course, this knowledge lined the bottom of every novel she wrote. Mary knew that it wasn’t how flashy her characters were or how clever the lines they delivered while under the gun—necessarily—that had her readers falling in love with and then rooting for them. It wasn’t clever plots that drew her readers back with gratifying regularity.
It was her characters’ relatability. What drew readers to her stories, time and again, was the way they could see themselves or people they knew in her characters. Mary understood that she did this so well that her characters stopped being characters to some of her readers and began to be real people.
She supposed it could be argued that, in the case of Thomas Thorncliffe, she’d done her job a little too well. Mary mentally shook her head. Emotional knee-jerk reactions aside, she really was too self-aware and well centered a person to believe that she bore any responsibility for that man’s behavior. Creating relatable characters was good. People loving them was good. Crazy-ass stalkers, not good.
As they left the sheriff’s office and headed back to her house, a walk that would take no more than a few minutes, Mary knew Toby’s sense of self was smarting. He was a cop. For him, as it was for Anthony, being cop wasn’t just a job. It was who he was, down to the bone.
Toby was hurting. She used her walking time to try to consider how she could help him. Mary believed that there were times when talking with someone who cared was the best medicine. It was true for herself, and it was true for most others.
As she walked, Mary wondered if she was going to have a hard time getting Toby to talk about his feelings.
Lucky for me my guys aren’t as averse to that as most men are.
“You sit, New York.” Toby held one of the kitchen chairs for her. “I’ll make us some sandwiches while Anthony makes the coffee.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She liked her little kitchen, although she could confess that it was a lot smaller since Anthony and Toby moved in.
“I feel better,” Toby said. “I didn’t think I would. I thought I’d lose Adam’s respect when I told him why I left Casper. I thought I’d just feel like a schmuck for letting my feelings determine my decision about Beck.”
Mary couldn’t have written a better opening. “But did you do that, Toby? Did you let your feelings determine your actions in the way you think? Because I’m seeing things a bit differently.”
He looked over his shoulder at her as he set the packages of ham and cheese on the counter. “Differently? How so?”
“You’re a cop, and you did the one thing that every cop who has a partner would and should do. You put your partner first. That is what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? It would have been another thing entirely, and I think you know it, if you’d had proof that Beck had broken the law. But you didn’t. For all you know, your suspicions were in fact inspired by, oh, I don’t know, perhaps a bit of larceny on the part of the bad guys? Maybe something that someone, somehow engineered?
“Maybe you were being manipulated so that you’d be suspicious of your partner. Seems to me, that kind of redirection or
