Page 5 of Ford

Because as he fell and fell, clutching her to his chest, he braced himself to hit the boulders below, very, very hard.

He just knew this op was doomed.

She should at least shed a few tears.

Scarlett was simply tired—too tired—to feel anything but a feeble pang as she stood in the cemetery and listened to the preacher she’d hired for her mother’s final sermon wheedle on about grace and the next life and an eternal hope that Scarlett felt pretty sure her mother hadn’t earned.

But there was that grace thing that people usually groped for when a loved one died. And yeah, she’d loved her mother, so maybe she should imagine her sitting on a cloud somewhere, dancing to Heart—It was nothing at all—and looking around to see if any of her former boyfriends had shown up in the stars.

It seemed pretty far-fetched, and honestly, to Scarlett, grace felt very inconvenient to the victims, the ones left wrecked.

After all, there should be some rules for grace. Who got it, for example, and how much. So maybe she’d have some compassion for her mother—she’d at least tried.

But a person like Axel Montrose shouldn’t get even a smidgen.

Not after he’d killed her mother.

Of course he’d died in the crash, too, which Scarlett should probably feel bad about for Gunnar’s sake.

Her half brother stood beside her dressed in a pair of dress pants and a T-shirt, the only clean things she could find for him. He wore his curly blond hair hippie style—long and tucked behind his ears—probably because her mother hadn’t bothered to cut it.

Now the preacher was asking the motley crew surrounding her mother’s casket to join hands. Gunnar, his baseball coach, Craig Ferril, and his wife, Ellen, who happened to be Gunnar’s second grade teacher. The preacher’s wife, out of courtesy, and Scarlett. Axel’s parents were dead, as were her own grandparents. Scarlett hadn’t a care what the state did with Axel’s body, but her mother had deserved something.

A simple casket, a grave dug in the Rockland, Idaho cemetery with a view of the pastureland and mountains to the north and west, the smell of manure drifting in the summer air, mixing with the scent of wild roses that grew like weeds near the church.

Maybe someday Scarlett could afford a marker.

Gunnar clutched Scarlett’s hand, his small and dirty in hers.

He hadn’t spoken since she arrived four days ago. She’d fetched him from the police station where the highway patrolman had taken him after he’d found the little boy home, in Rockland, alone.

The state patrol could hardly report the death of his parents to a seven-year-old boy, so Gunnar had given them his half-sister’s name. They tracked Scarlett down in San Diego the very day the rest of her life had started.

The day she passed her entrance physical readiness test—her PRT—to become a Navy Rescue Swimmer.

There Mom went again, destroying her future.

Scarlett hated Rockland. A tiny spit of a town on the southern border of Idaho, a couple hours north of Salt Lake City. She’d only visited twice—the last time being just weeks ago with Ford Marshall, after their deployment to Bahrain ended. How her mother had ended up here with a former convict…maybe her dreams simply spiraled out, leaving her with nothing.

Sadly, she’d been doing so well before Scarlett left on her deployment. Had a job at the local library. Had gotten her one-year pin.

The crowd was reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Scarlett had learned it once while staying at a foster placement when she was about Gunnar’s age.And forgive us our trespasses…

She’d called her mother the day she returned home, heard her mother’s slurred voice over the telephone, and knew she’d slid off the wagon. Again.

And Axel had held her hand every slippery downward step.

As we forgive those who trespass against us…

The sun had climbed to its peak, hovering there as it churned sweat down her spine, across her forehead. The cemetery was located next to the Presbyterian church, in a patch of drying grass, the area gated as if it might protect the internees from escaping.

Scarlett planned on packing up Gunnar the minute they returned to the tiny rental bungalow and flooring it back to San Diego as fast as her Ford Escape could go.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the preacher said now and picked up some dirt, leaving it on the arch of the coffin.

Craig and Ellen did the same, probably more out of condolence for Gunnar than his mother, although who knew what life Sammy-Jo Hathaway had really lived.

The only life Scarlett knew was the one she had fled nearly a decade ago, diving into the Navy for escape.