Page 14 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Sheriff

I’d have done them myself, but Hope pulled her chair closer and started calling at the top of the list.

I listen to her with half an ear as she charms and cajoles and gently bullies a dozen stubborn old people onto higher ground—no, Miss Ada, bring the cats, of course bring the cats, put ‘em in the carrier, I’ll hold while you do it—and she keeps my coffee full without being asked, and slides a fresh cookie onto the plate every time one disappears, and slowly, call by call, name by name, the county gets accounted for.

And somewhere in there, without deciding to, I relax.

I can’t tell you the last time that happened. Shoulders down. Jaw loose. The kind of relief from a man who has, for once, let something be carried by someone else’s hands.

She catches me watching her and lifts an eyebrow. “What?”

“Nothing.” I look back at my cell. “You’re good at that.”

“I’m good with people who don’t want help.” She says it light, but her eyes flick to me when she does.

It’s somewhere past midnight when the scare comes.

A call unaccounted for out near Little Creek, which becomes a big ass river if the rain falls in the right place. My deputies haven’t heard back from them and I know Hope hadn’t reached them when she tried. And suddenly I’m back in it, fully in it, the old cold dropping over me like a net while Reyes runs a unit out to check. I sit useless at a kitchen table two miles away and wait, which is the thing I have never once in my life been able to do.

Hope sets a cookie by my hand.

“Not everything gets fixed with a goddamn cookie, Hope.”

The words are ugly the second they’re out. I know it. I’ve done it again, taken the worst thing in me and thrown it at the softest target in the room. Because she’s easy aim. She’s bright, because she’s warm, and I know, just like Tara, she won’t be able to handle all the darkness my job provides. Small town sheriffs don’t get near as much as a big city detective, but the ugliness of the world can find you anywhere. Hope’s too soft to handle all of that.

I temper my voice when I speak again. “I only mean that sometimes things can’t be fixed. There’s a lot of nastiness out there and no amount of sunshine can change that.”

She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t fire back. She goes very quiet, and she pushes back the chair across from me and stands, and she says, in a voice I’ve never heard her use—flat, level, old—“You think I don’t know about the evil and darkness that sometimes life brings?”

She pulls off her shirt and normally I’d be focused on the pretty bra she just revealed. But it doesn’t take me long to hone in on the scars across the softness of her stomach. Small, round white circles scattered all over her lower torso.

“Cigarette burns,” I say.

She nods. Then she turns, and I see the thinner white lines that crisscross over her back.

“The cigarettes were how my mother taught me lessons. The back was one of her live-in boyfriends who thought it was fun to whip me with a willow tree switch.”

“Christ, Hope.” I swallow thickly. “I had no idea.”

“Obviously. Because I don’t advertise it.” She puts her shirt back on then leans forward on the table, getting closer to me. “That dark part of my life… before I was removed and became a ward of the state, that’s a moment in my story. It’s not my whole story. It doesn’t tell about how that scared little girl was put into a foster home with two other little girls and how the three of them became a family unit that has lasted into their adulthood. It doesn’t tell how I put myself through school so I could show people that sometimes touch can heal. It doesn’t tell about my extreme stubbornness or my affinity for baking or the fact that bright colors make me feel calm.

“The darkness isn’t my story. It’s just a part of it. So don’t tell me I don’t know about it, Sheriff,” she finishes, soft. “I just don’t choose to decorate with it.”

The radio crackles. Reyes: the unaccounted-for address is clear—folks evacuated to a daughter’s place hours ago and just hadn’t told anyone. Everybody’s safe. Everybody’s accounted for.

I barely hear it. I’m looking at Hope Bailey like I’ve never seen her before, because I haven’t. At least not all of her. I’d made her a caricature in my mind, a one-dimensional woman I felt drawn to, but didn’t understand.

Later—everyone safe, the phone finally quiet, the rain finally easing to something that sounds like rain again—I find her curled in the corner of her couch. I sit down on the other end of it, close, in my ridiculous robe.

“I’m sorry. For yelling. For making assumptions. For everything.” I scrub a hand down my face. “I have to ask you something, because I genuinely don’t understand it. How do you—” I gesture at all of her. You’re so warm and light. Like walking sunshine. Yet you’ve endured more than most people could even imagine. Certainly more than me. Yet, you’re the brightest person I’ve ever met. How?”

She’s quiet a moment, turning her mug in her hands.

“Because it’s a choice,” she says. “Every single day. I choose it. My past is real; I’m not pretending it isn’t. It still makes me very sad, if I let it, that my mother loved drugs more than she ever loved me. But that only says things about her, not me. I was a child and I did nothing wrong to deserve the abuse. So I just refuse to let it be the thing that drives.”

She looks up at me. “And here’s the part you won’t want to hear, Mr. Grumpy Sheriff. I would walk through every bit of it again to get to Cora and Jules.” A small shrug, and then a small smile that wrecks me. “So I don’t hate the fire. I walked through it and it brought me home. That’s worth choosing to be happy about. That’s worth cookies.”

I don’t have a single word.

She’s the answer to a question I quit asking years ago. She’s proof of the thing I decided wasn’t possible—that you can hold the darkness and still choose the light. That letting someone all the way in isn’t a liability. That maybe, just maybe, the problem with mine and Tara’s relationship was simply that we didn’t match.