Natalie.

The step-dick’s white truck crests the shoulder of the road a quarter mile in front of her car. His truck fishtails right and left and right again. Glorious. He would die driving off the cliff and it wouldn’t be her fault. She mashes the brakes, and jams her Subaru into first gear, slowing the car as the engine whines. Her car skids, straightens before stopping.

She watches. She waits. She hopes.

The white truck rocks safely to a stop.

Plan B. She will push him over the edge and claim it was an accident, that she had lost control, that she hit him accidentally. He’d go over, but she would stop. Physics, right? She steps on the gas. No wimping out. No more second chances.

Cady.

After Larry had left her and before she married Trey, she alone had been the last line of defense between the kids and the dark of night. She slept with one ear open to the slightest change—when the wind shifted, when Michael’s asthma attacked, when Natalie paced her room in the depths of night. The dog would stir from his bed and stand guard at the window as the moon slid up and away through the stars. She had listened through all the nights when disaster did not fall.

All those nights she had waited for that disaster to land square on her head. Then she relaxed to admire her new-found life with Trey.

She dry-swallowed another of Doc’s bitter tablets. She was afraid of this night, but even worse was the thought of day. She’d been afraid before, but she’d never felt so alone.

Larry.

The truck’s engine hummed as Larry drove north out of Fortune. Sunlight came in the window and Cady’s shadow shrunk up against the passenger door. So much had happened in this truck. He’d lost his heart, his virginity, and a stillborn child all to the woman beside him. Then he’d driven away to Denver losing his family and faith in himself.

After more than two years gone and six months sober, he’d driven three hundred and thirty-three miles to come home for his dad’s funeral. The two mountain ranges he aimed at, deep on the west side of Colorado, were like a magnet to true north. Cady had been at the funeral with the kids. She was kind, but distant. Trey de la Croix was already on her horizon.

“I figured out about those suitcases,” she said.

He sped past a stand of aspens that flashed shadows across them like a bar-code scanning what he was and how much he was worth.

Sheriff TD Wilman.

The cruiser slowed as it topped the rise in Cady’s driveway. All five Finger Peaks surrounded her house like a scrum of over-protective brothers. The mountains were like family in the high-country. Sometimes they loved you and sometimes they’d kick you to the curb. Some days he thought about just walking away and never looking back. People did it. A long time ago he’d planned on leaving, courtesy of college football and the bigger dreams that followed. But his folks were buried here side by side along with his older brother, TJ, who came home from Desert Storm in a box—the Wilman who should have been sheriff instead of him.

With Natalie’s death, Cady had six generations keeping her tied to this place.

Bones like goddamn roots.