Snowstorm of Our Past novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: The Hearing

I didn't answer her.

I finished my report to the medic, and I closed the ambulance doors on her myself.

Then I walked back to Gabe's truck and sat in the passenger seat.

I held my hands to the heater until the sun came up over the lake.

He didn't say a word the whole time.

He just handed me a butterscotch candy out of his pocket.

I didn't ask him how long he'd been carrying those around.

The hearing stayed on February twentieth.

Clint's lawyer called mine the day after the pass and said only that his client's position had "evolved."

"That's lawyer for he got buried in an avalanche," my lawyer said.

Amber was out on bail by the end of that week.

The baby boy stayed with Clint.

The judge in Colorado Springs gave him temporary custody.

A sitter from post watched the baby while he worked with his wrist in a cast.

Clint went to his colonel the next Monday.

I didn't hear it from him.

I heard it from Gran, who heard it from the colonel's wife.

She'd called the Silver Spur to order a pie and stayed on the phone for forty minutes.

"She says he went into the colonel's office at seven in the morning and didn't come out until ten," Gran said. "She says the colonel had to cancel his golf."

"In February?"

"It's an indoor golf thing. Don't change the subject."

The Lake County courthouse is an old brick building on Harrison Avenue, four blocks from the diner.

I'd walked past it every day of my childhood.

On the morning of the twentieth, I walked in wearing my green wool dress.

My braid was pinned up, and my lawyer was at my elbow.

The little courtroom was full.

Gran sat in the front row with Tilly on her lap in the snowflake sweater.

The whole team had come.

The schoolteacher, the dog handler, the kid in a tie that was too short for him.

Gabe sat at the end of the row in a button-down shirt and no beanie.

His hair stuck up in the back. I'd never seen him without a hat indoors.

The old man who eats two eggs at seven fifteen was there too, with his wife.

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