“Perfect,” she said. “Let’s do the one-minute game.”
“The what?” He looked over to her with a blank look on his face.
Winnie settled into her seat and looked at all the buttons on the dashboard. “Where’s the one to turn on my seat heater?”
“I got you,” he said, and he reached over and pressed a button for her.
“The one-minute game is something my parents made us do on road trips,” Winnie said. “They’d give us a topic, and we’d have to talk about it for sixty seconds. Our thoughts, our feelings, whatever we wanted to say.” She watched his reaction. “No judgment, of course.”
“No judgment,” he said. “So who’s going to set the topic?”
“I’ll give you yours, and you can give me mine.” Winnie swallowed, not quite sure where this would go. “You can go first if you want.”
“Sixty seconds is a long time,” Ty said.
“We can make it the thirty-second game,” Winnie said.
“Does it have to be the truth?” he asked.
“Oh, my word.” Winnie rolled her eyes. “Or—what do you say? For the love of eight seconds?” She gave him a glare. “For the love of eight seconds, Ty. Just say whatever you want.”
“I just want to know the rules of the game,” he said, his voice a touch darker now. “So I can play it right.”
“It’s not a game, Ty. It’s just talking.”
“Well, that can be hard for some people.” He drove in silence for a couple of beats, then released his tight grip on the wheel and exhaled. “But I want to…talk to you.”
Winnie lifted her chin for a new reason now. “I’ve been told I talk too much. I don’t mean to be soextra.”
“You’re not extra,” he said. “Or if you are, I don’t mind it.”
“Okay.” Winnie took a deep breath and tried to give the oxygen a moment to settle into each brain cell. “Well, I’d kind of like to start with what the pastor talked about today. Hopes. Dreams. What are your hopes and dreams?”
Ty sighed, rolled his right shoulder, and looked out his side window. “Going straight in, I see.”
“Surely you have some hopes and dreams,” she said.
“You said you’d go first.”
“But it should be a question from you,”she said.
“Fine.” He shot her another dark look. “Do you like Three Rivers?”
“Yeah,” she said, ignoring his attitude. “First, I really like the clinic here. My boss is great, and my co-workers are easy to trade shifts with, that kind of thing. They’re fun.” She smiled and noted that Ty slowed the truck and made a right turn off the highway.
They now drove down a gravel road that turned to dirt, and Ty’s truck handled it like a champ.
“I think Three Rivers is beautiful in the summer and fall, and it’s not been too bad in the winter either—we get way more snow in Oklahoma for sure—and I have a cute little house. The cats like it here, and it’s a good buffer for me to Redwood.”
“And that’s where you’re from?”
“Mm hm,” she said, though he wasn’t supposed to get to ask follow-up questions. “There are a lot of good restaurants in town too, and I don’t know. When I take my evening walk, I just feel good here, you know?”
“Yeah,” Ty said. “Three Rivers has some magic to it.”
She waited, and when he didn’t ask her something else, she grinned at him. “When you’re done, you have to tell me.”
“More rules I didn’t know,” he shot back at her. “I’m done.”
