Page 17 of Won't Back Down
Bracing myself for her answer, I asked one of the world’s dumbest questions. “Hey. You okay?”
She turned instinctively toward the sound of my voice, looking up at me, but I didn’t think she really saw me. There were no tears. No rage. She didn’t have that haunted look I’d come to associate with whatever traumas she kept to herself. She simply appeared thunderstruck.
I glanced around. “Where are your parents?”
“Gone.” The single syllable came out quiet. Numb.
Something huge had just happened, and she was in the quiet before the storm of reaction. I needed to get her out of town before it hit.
“Okay. Come on.”
When she didn’t immediately follow, I grabbed her hand and tugged gently. She fell into vaguely stumbling step beside me. Oh, yeah. Major overwhelm here.
At her Jeep, I held out my free hand. “Keys?”
Wordlessly, she handed them over.
I bundled her into the passenger seat and circled around to climb in myself. This close to her, I could sense the frenetic energy under the surface of the emotions she simply couldn’t process. There was far too much input here. I could fix that, at least for a little while.
Quick and efficient, I navigated through the village, working my way off the main thoroughfares that were clogged with summer tourists, until we hit the coastal road that ran north, toward Sutter land. I drove by instinct as much as habit, leaving signs of civilization behind until, at last, we were parked near the dunes that marked the edge of the marshes beyond the woods. This had been our place when we were young. Where we’d hang out and talk and watch for the band of horses that brought her so much joy.
Too late, I second guessed my choice. If the worst had come to pass, seeing them might break her in ways I wasn’t prepared to handle. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake bringing her here.
Before I could do anything else, she’d climbed out and moved toward the edge of the woods, where the thick, low branches of a live oak stretched gnarled, twisted arms and made a convenient hiding spot to sit unobserved. Unerringly, she climbed into one of the crooks. I followed suit, wedging myself a little less easily into the opposite curve of the branch than I had when I’d been younger. She stared out at the marsh, and I waited. Eventually, the frantic energy I sensed pumping off her began to calm, the panic she hadn’t acknowledged waning. I’d done at least one thing right in bringing her here.
“They left me everything.”
I jerked to look at her, not a hundred percent certain I’d heard her right over the whisper of wind and the distant roar of the surf. “They what?”
“They left me everything. There’s some stuff that’s been earmarked for Jace, and a trust to go toward the betterment of the island. But the ferry company, the land, the house, the assets—they left them all to me.”
Something in me unclenched. I hadn’t dared hope for this for her, but after all the stories I’d heard at the memorial, I wasn’t surprised.
She finally looked at me, those hazel eyes almost luminous. “What were they thinking?”
“That you were the best of the Sutters, and that you’d do right by all of it.”
Willa huffed a laugh. “That’s what Mr. O’Shea said, too.”
I nudged her foot with mine. “See? Majority rules.”
With a helpless shrug, she scooped a hand through the hair the wind had determinedly tugged from her braid. “But I don’t know anything about how to run a ferry company or how to do any of this stuff. There are going to be all these people counting on me and looking to me for leadership. I’m not prepared for any of that.”
Ah. And here was the sticking point for the overwhelm.
Leaning toward her, I offered the bag with the cookies I’d bought. “Here.”
Her brows drew together. “What’s this?”
“Fortification.”
She opened it, her expression lightening as she pulled out a cookie. “You got me snickerdoodles?”
“You used to say they helped everything.”
A smile fluttered at the corners of her mouth. “So I did. Here, you have one, too.”
She handed me the cookie, then pulled out the other.