Atonement

She nodded. “A man stopped by a day or two before Ethan left. Ethan went outside to talk to him, but I overheard them arguing. Ethan mentioned the name Halbrook. It’s unusual enough, I remembered it.”

“Did you ask Ethan what the argument was about?”

“He told me he owed the man money. I asked how much and suggested he use the money I had in savings to pay the man. I hadn’t liked the look of the man and didn’t want him coming back around.”

“Ethan didn’t jump at that?”

“He said he didn’t want my money, that it was for our house.” She scoffed at that now. “He knew I’d put the money in both our names. Talk about trusting.”

“Tell me about you,” Dillon said, and glanced over at her. “If you don’t mind.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you’d like to share with me.”

* * *

TESSA THOUGHT ABOUT that for a moment. More to the point, what did she really know about Dillon? He wasn’t his brother—that much was clear. He was a man who worked both as an undersheriff and at his own ranch. He was kind and generous and compassionate, and he’d taken an entirely different route in life than his brother had.

What scared her was that in Dillon she glimpsed what she had wanted to see in his twin. She knew it was crazy, but Ethan had been just enough like his brother that she felt she already knew Dillon. She trusted him, and trust didn’t come easily to her. Ethan’s betrayal had only made her less trusting.

“I was born and raised in California. My parents were killed in a car wreck when I was two. I was in the car, but I miraculously survived. A neighbor lady took me in and raised me until her death, when I was sixteen. After that, I was on my own.” She’d purposely left out the part about the foster homes the county had put her in. She’d barely survived those with her life. That had been the real miracle.

Dillon studied her for a moment before turning back to his driving. He seemed to sense the parts she’d left out and was kind enough not to ask.

“You want more for your daughter,” he said after a moment.

“Of course I do,” she said. “I suppose that is the real reason I came all this way looking for Ethan. I wanted to give him another chance to be a father to our daughter.”

“What about another chance with you?”

She shook her head. “He used up his last chance when he left the way he did.”

* * *

DILLON COULD SEE what his brother had seen in Tessa. Ethan would have liked her independence, the fire in her, not to mention her beauty both inside and out. Ethan had chosen well. So why had he burned his bridges when he’d left?

Because he’d known he wouldn’t be back?

“I’m sorry my brother hurt you,” Dillon said as the Montana countryside blurred past, a tableau of shades of green from the new bright grasses to the deeper, richer shades of the cool pines. The mountains rose around them, most still snowcapped.

“It was my own fault.” She turned as if to gaze out at the passing landscape.

“You must have seen something good in him. Isn’t it possible he really did want to change? Really did want everything he said he did?”

She let out a sound that made him hurt inside. “Better to think that than I’m a fool who was taken in by a handsome cowboy, right?”

He could see that Tessa had thought herself smarter. She’d let herself be fooled by a man. She hadn’t yet learned that love was a heart thing, often with no brain involved.

He glanced in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t thought to check for a tail. Then again, he hadn’t thought he needed to. There were cars and pickups and a couple semis behind them. If they were being followed, he couldn’t tell.

“There was no warning?” he asked, hoping to get her talking about Ethan.

“The signs were there. I just chose not to see them.”

“Signs?”

“He’d been more moody in the days right before he left. Antsy and uncharacteristically impatient. More secretive, too. If I asked him where he’d been or what he was looking at on the computer—”

“He had a computer?” This surprised Dillon. Ethan had ranted about the new technologies on his visit two years ago. He’d said that was why he worked on ranches. He didn’t have to learn how to use a computer, let alone a smartphone.

Tessa’s chuckle had a bitter edge to it. “No, he didn’t own a computer. Other than his old pickup and his saddle, had he ever owned anything?”

“So he used yours. Do you still have it?” He could see that she understood at once.

“I checked it after he left. I thought...” She looked away.

He knew exactly what she’d thought. An online romance with another woman.

“He had said he was looking for a new saddle. I showed him how to use a search engine. He wasn’t dumb. He didn’t ask for my help after that.”

Dillon knew his brother wasn’t shopping on the internet for a saddle. So what had he been looking for? “Did he find a saddle?”

Another short laugh. “He wasn’t looking for a saddle. He was looking for a gun.”

“A gun?” Dillon asked.

“He had guns—a .357 he kept rolled up in its holster beside the bed, and a hunting rifle, a .30 Winchester, that hung on the rack in his pickup. Both were old. I suspect they meant something to him?”

“Our uncle Jack gave him the .357 before Jack died. The Winchester was our grandfather’s.” Dillon was a little surprised, given his brother’s lifestyle, that he’d somehow managed to hang on to them.

He’d never thought of Ethan as being sentimental. Nor had he seemed like someone who cared about possessions. More and more Dillon was realizing how little he knew his twin.

He cracked his window, needing air. The more he learned about his brother, the more sick at heart he became. The lush spring Montana landscape was a tapestry of contrasts, from the new bright green grass to the dark pines of the mountains, from the blinding white snow capping the peaks to the cloudless blue of the sky. The sweet scents reminded him of springs when they were boys.

The one thing he knew now without a doubt was that Tessa had known his brother. When and for how long? Well, that was still the question, wasn’t it? But he wouldn’t be looking for his brother unless part of him believed her, believed Ethan was alive.

“So what kind of gun was he looking for online?” He couldn’t fathom that, even if Ethan had wanted another gun, why he would look for it on the internet. Not when he could pick one up at a local gun show. Again, it didn’t sound like his brother.

“He’d deleted the sites he went to. But I hadn’t told him about how the computer kept a history of the sites visited.” She shrugged, giving away more than she probably meant to. Even back when they’d been talking marriage, she hadn’t completely trusted the man she’d fallen in love with.

“Why would he feel the need to lie about what he was looking for?” Dillon asked after a moment.

Tessa seemed to pull herself out of the past. She came out of it angry again, but he suspected it was more with herself than Ethan. “Why would he lie about everything? I have no idea. I just know that he was looking at antique rifles. I saw on one site that a similar rifle to the one he was viewing went for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“So he was just looking.”

“I guess so. He’d been saving his money. I thought for a house for us, but he could have been saving it to buy a rifle, for all I know.”