“You are my home, Liz. I love you.”
She blinked slowly, and then leaning into him, nose to nose, took a breath and held it. He hoped it wasn’t the wrong thing to say. He prayed she was just absorbing it, figuring out what to say back.He knew those words weren’t frivolous for her. They had been heavy in the past.
“I love you too,” she blurted, and kissed him.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Liz sat cross-legged on the edge of Jake’s bed, Jake sprawled in his underwear, asleep on top of the rumpled covers.
With the dawn peeking through the crack in the curtains, she’d finally given up the effort of sleeping any longer. She was jumbled and disoriented for a moment, then the night before came back to her and she was now thinking, putting all the pieces together so she could process.
What they had said last night was as black and white as it got. They had admitted to love, and it was still echoing in her head.
She fished Brett’s letter from the back pocket of her jeans on the floor, the card bent, the letter wrinkled. It had been short and to the point. She worried the edge with her fingers, then set it on the bedside table. She’d read it once. It was enough.
He wrote that she had grown into a good woman. He instructed her to be patient with his sons, all three of them, and shepherd her mother, making sure Peony got whatever she needed.
He’d also said he loved her mother and hoped she knew that.
That was it.
It was an odd feeling, seeing his words, praise in them, purpose in their hastily scratched out lines. Odd in the sense that there was more admission of care in those words than he had ever said to her in life. She wasn’t sure what to do with them.
Last night after she’d read the letter, alone at her house, she hadn’t known what to do with herself either. She didn’t want to be alone but was resolved to give everyone their space. Her mother had gone to bed, declining Liz’s offer to read their letters together.
She’d paced her living room. She’d swept the floor in the kitchen. She’d checked her email, of which there was none. She’d flipped TV channels and contemplated going for a drive. All of it seemed trivial.
Knowing she was snooping where she shouldn’t, she’d snuck into her mother’s room after finally being fed up with the anxiety and nerves gnawing at her. Guiltily, she fished the letter out of her mother’s sweater, which was hanging off her reading chair. It had been opened, and carefully folded back up, only slightly wrinkled.
Her mother had been sleeping, the rhythmic up and down of her breathing quiet in the massive space of the master suite. So Liz had tiptoed into the bathroom down the hall, closed the door, perched on the toilet, and opened the letter.
She hesitated, knowing she was committing some grave sin, but helpless to stop. The need to know if Brett really had cared for her mother as he said, or if it was as Peony said, indeed a business deal, had bothered her since the day her mother had mentioned it. After a moment’s more hesitation, her curiosity won out over her morals.
So she dove in, deciding to ask for forgiveness afterward.
My darling Peony,
You are the strongest woman I know. When I am gone, I know you will pick up the reins and keep riding, no matter the cost. I hope you did not grieve overly much. It doesn’t suit your practiced steel.
In my private study safe, which has been opened now, is a life insurance policy. You are named on it. It is set in a way to be a lump sum, but when you contact George, the man listed on the document, he can outline what options you have. I hope it will keep you well, instead of relying on the ranch to provide you an income. This is why you are not mentioned in the will. I wanted no contest for that policy if things do not pan out how I have set them up.
Jake has a letter as well, and in it I have instructed him that you are to stay here, on the ranch, under his—or Tanner’s—care. I’m sure the boys have discovered all the documents in my study by now. If not, I trust it was you who finally dug through my mess and found it all.
With regards to our burial plot, I have instructed the funeral home that your stone is to be placed beside the West monument, with your own name on it and room for Elizabeth and whoever she ends up marrying, if she wants it. You are a West by marriage, but you and she deserve a spot of your own, near where I am, but not in shadow of those who came before you.
Jake. Is he the same as I described him to you? Is he strong, is he levelheaded? From what I was given as information, he is a good man, and I based my wishes from that. He took care of Heather for all those years, and I can only imagine what that meant for him. I want him to have the ranch—it is his by inheritance, but he is a West, and we are stubborn asses. If nothing else, I wish for you and the boys to know him and at least give him a picture of who I was.
I hope in all this subterfuge, he and his brothers can forgive my need for secrecy. I honestly don’t know why I kept him from you all this time. I have so many failures when it comes to my sons, and I can only think the habit of keeping those failures hidden was spilling forward, I suppose. Forgive me. I asked too much of you, keeping my secrets until it was too late.
I know you are likely angry with me for not telling you about the cancer. I didn’t want to endure the pleas to treat it, the long, drawn-out conversations around a sickness I could do nothing about. Better to live fully and die with dignity instead of in a hospital room, connected to machines, barely coherent from the drugs they would pump me full of. I wanted to die in my boots on the land that I loved, or at least in my own bed, asleep beside you.
I love you, Peony, more than I ever told you. I didn’t know how to show you that it overwhelmed me the day I realized that your presence in my life was no longer negotiable. Your touch was soothing, your sweet smile a balm every day we were together. You understood me in ways no one else did, and were tolerant of who I was, without asking for anything in return.
What we had was comfortable and easy for me. I know I frustrated you at the best of times. I sometimes wondered why you were with me, what you saw in a grumpy, tired man who couldn’t give you the romance and gentleness you deserved. I tried, in my way, to give you the security you needed instead.
This letter feels like a poor substitute, and I must find the courage to tell you in person, before I die, but I have the insurance of words on the page in case I run out of time.
You are the matriarch of this family now; take care of my sons. I know you will keep them in line.
