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rehabbed some more, worked out, but not that hard, not that serious, and the weight he’d cut started to hang on him again. He’d sit in her apartment in the dark, flipping through TV channels or reading books by whatever sunlight he let in through the windows.
    Never sports, though, never that, and none since. Finally, when itwas near unbearable, both of them washed out and colorless, he came in one afternoon and said he was going home, back to Murfee—a place to her that was only TV clips and high school game films. He’d made a call she knew nothing about to the sheriff’s department and they’d agreed to take him on. It was decent, honest work he could be proud of, and the old family house was still there and it was all set, easy. She knew without his saying it that he needed to get out of Waco, away once and for all. And standing there in the jeans he always wore so no one, most of all her, could see that white and coiled snake of a scar from the surgery, he’d almost been happy. Almost himself again.
    Even still, the words were right there on the tip of her tongue, ready to spit it out:
Go fuck yourself, Chris.
He wasn’t going to make a decision like that on his own. He didn’t get to play house with her and then walk away, leaving her with nothing. He was supposed to be—
was going to be, goddammit
—different from and better than every other man she’d known from her daddy onward. She almost said all those things too—staring into his eyes, which were most often blue but other times appeared bottle green—when he finally smiled at her, wide, embarrassed.
    Misunderstood. That’s when
she
understood he wasn’t talking about leaving Waco alone.
    While he twisted his hands, hoping she got his meaning without making him put the words together out loud, she tossed water on that match-strike anger she’d struggled with forever—the same anger that had gotten her daddy in so much trouble for so much of their lives. An anger that had lit him from within, so that he was nearly glowing with it, his fists throwing sparks, always trying to set the world on fire. Burning them both.
    Instead, she’d hugged Chris, face tilted down and hard, so he wouldn’t see her cry.
    It took them a month to pack up what bits and pieces of a life they had in Waco, and then just like that they were here, in Murfee, unlocking the long-empty house he’d grown up in and where both of his parents had died. That first night there had been a rare West Texas rain, all noise and fury and white light against the dusty windows, and she’d given herself to him on a few blankets thrown down on the floor, with water dripping all round them.
    She woke the next morning and stood on this still-wet porch and saw all the color that had sprung up overnight, the earth taking water like a dying man, with a pale mist falling skyward over hills that were the same sudden uncertain green of Chris’s eyes.
    That had been truly nice, her best moment since coming here. Now the rain only reminded her that there were still a few holes in the roof Chris hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet.
    •   •   •
    Mel wasn’t sure what Chris thought coming back to Murfee might actually fix: his life, his knee, her. Them. If anything, coming home had made him more withdrawn, more sullen. Beyond the job, Mel couldn’t imagine what he was looking for here anymore. And that left
her
lost, alone, not knowing what she was fighting against or for.
    But still they went on, rusting away minute by minute, until two days ago, when Chris had found the body out at a place called Indian Bluffs. It was all he thought about now—
his investigation
—and she hated herself for letting it get under her skin, letting it drive her fucking crazy. Chris was finally alive, awake, like those hills after the rain, and it had nothing to do with her at all.
    •   •   •
    Chris had snapped a few pictures on his phone and showed them to her that first night, sitting up in