Chapter 10: Rafe's POV: What He Offered

Rafe's POV

I had not been afraid of Boone Tarrant since I was twenty-four.

I was afraid of him that morning, standing on my own porch steps in my socks.

My shoulder was still warm where Annie's head had been.

He sat on the hood of his truck with his arms folded and a thick envelope on his knee.

He hadn't slept either.

"Lanier," he said, as if we'd run into each other at the feed store.

"Boone."

"Nice place. Smells like a tire fire."

I came down the steps and stopped ten feet from him.

Upstairs, a curtain moved.

I didn't look up.

I had told her to stay in the room, and for once in her life she had agreed.

"You've got ten seconds," I said. "Then you're off my land."

"It's not your land. It's a bank's." He smiled. "I looked it up."

I said nothing.

He held out the envelope.

"There's twenty thousand in there. Cash. It's yours."

"For what?"

"For putting my wife in your truck and driving her back to my house."

I looked at the envelope, and I didn't take it.

For fifteen years I had pictured this man in a hundred ways.

Hurt, sorry or dying, dragged into the light and made to say what he had done.

I had never pictured him bargaining, with a bank envelope, in clean boots.

"You think I'm for sale," I said.

"I think everybody is. It's a question of the number."

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