Chapter 6: One Room

We rode until the rain started, somewhere across the Kentucky line, and then Ronan pulled into the first motel with a light on.

The clerk looked at the two of us, soaked and dirty, with a steel urn on my hip.

"One room left," he said. "Single bed. Fifty-nine dollars."

"We'll take two," I said.

"There's one."

I looked at Ronan.

His face gave nothing away.

"I'll sleep on the floor," he said.

It was a small gray room that smelled like old smoke.

I set my father's urn on the dresser and stood there with my back to the door.

For fourteen months I had slept next to Bronco, and tonight I would sleep in a motel with a man who had said maybe thirty words to me in his life.

Ronan dropped his saddlebags by the wall.

"Sit," he said.

"I'm fine."

"Your arm isn't."

He took a first aid kit from his saddlebag, a real one, with a zip and a red cross, and he knelt on the carpet in front of the bed.

I sat on the edge of the mattress because my legs said so.

He peeled back the wet gas-station towel.

My forearm was a mess of torn skin and gravel, and the sight of it made my stomach turn.

"Hold still."

He poured something cold across it, and I sucked in a breath.

"That's the worst of it."

"You said that about the last one."

"Did I?"

"No. But you're thinking it."

The corner of his mouth moved.

It might have been a smile.

Then he took my wrist in his left hand and started cleaning out the gravel with a pair of tweezers, one grain at a time.

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