“You’re quiet,” Gretchen said.
They were driving up into the mountains now, following a winding, steep road that was only barely wide enough to accommodate their car. They’d left Isabelle down in Ambergris, because—as she’d loftily said—she could fly herself home easily enough.
She had given him and Gretchen quick, fierce hugs, wishing them luck before adding, almost shyly, “And I go by Iz now... with my friends.”
Kid though she was, she was a friend worth having. It was funny to think that he owed her a lot for helping them and yet he might not ever see her again.
He might not ever even come down this mountain again.
“Of course,” Gretchen said, uncannily following his thinking, “you’ve got a lot to be quiet about.”
“I just can’t believe I missed who he really was. Who they all really were.” He was glad she was driving, because it let him briefly bury his head in his hands. He scrubbed his fingers up through his hair.
Bizarrely, that gesture was what reminded him that he had a lot to be thankful for. A few days ago, his hair would have been stiff and spiky from using nothing more than the lousy prison soap for shampoo. Now he finally felt clean again, and his hair was soft to the touch.
But that didn’t change the gut-level feeling of betrayal. Just because he’d gotten lucky now didn’t mean he hadn’t gotten spectacularly unlucky before—and he hadn’t even noticed at the time.
“They must have been laughing at me behind my back the whole time. I feel like such an idiot.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you for wanting to believe the best about people. No one walks into their office and wonders if everyone there is in on some criminal conspiracy, Coop. That wasn’t a problem you should have ever had to worry about.”
“I should have seen the signs.”
“You did see the signs. You knew you didn’t fit in. You knew Phil could be a dick and the other two could be strange. You saw everything that was there for you to see—these are sharp guys, and they know how criminals get caught. They were careful, and you still picked up on something being wrong.”
He opened his mouth to tear into himself again, but then his griffin pushed forward into his consciousness and said, She’s right.
Was she?
She was Gretchen, his mate, so that was definitely a point in favor of him trusting her argument.
Besides, he’d spent so long waiting to get his griffin back that he hated to think of ignoring it now.
When she first picked you up, you knew how good she was. And you thought that if you escaped, it wouldn’t be fair for anyone to blame her for it or think she was careless. You were a Marshal too, and you knew all the tricks, so you had one-up on all the other prisoners she had to escort. If it wouldn’t have been fair to blame Gretchen for letting you escape, even though she was on her guard, how is it fair to blame yourself for missing the truth about your team when you didn’t even have any reason to suspect them?
It was like his guilt had been a hand on his throat, choking him, and with this thought, it had finally eased off.
For the first time in months, he not only knew he was innocent, he felt like he was innocent. He hadn’t done anything to bring this down on himself.
He had deserved better than what he’d gotten.
Ever since the arrest, he’d been trying like hell to not seem angry, because anger only made him look scary to other people. Scary and probably guilty. But now, knowing that Gretchen knew him even better than he knew himself, he could let those feelings have free rein. He could finally feel the enormity of how Phil and Roger and Monroe had screwed him over, and he could be pissed about it.
“Coop?”
“You’re right,” he said. He still couldn’t get over what it felt like to finally be able to breathe freely.
She’d given that back to him. She hadn’t just given him the sky; she’d given him the air.
“You’re right,” Cooper said again. “There wasn’t a lot I could have done differently. They lied to me, they used me, and they framed me.” He took a huge breath, relishing the feeling it gave him. “And now we’re going to find them and drag them into the light of day, and they’re going to have to tell everyone what happened. And you know what matters to me most about all that?”
He was half-expecting her to make some joke about how it was probably the part where he’d get out of prison, but instead she just said softly, “What?”
“The fact that I started all that just saying ‘I’ and I get to end it saying ‘we.’”
A wide smile spread across Gretchen’s face. “My favorite part is getting you free so that we can be us all the time.”
“We make a good us,” Cooper agreed. “And then we can start figuring out what you—”