Avet’s clinic smells like antiseptic. Period. You can buy all the air purifiers you want; that smell isn’t going anywhere. It’d be worse if I boarded animals, which I don’t, ‘cause I’m a large-animal vet.
Sure, I’ll patch up a dog or cat if someone brings one in, but most professional care I offer happens out on the ranch.
This is Wildflower Canyon, not West Hollywood. Folks don’t carry poodles in purses—they’ve got cow dogs and barn cats.
I’ve been throwing myself into work, taking calls outside the Canyon and working for ranchers who are glad for my skill set and don’t care that I’m Sarah Kirk, the girl who “tried to ruin” Landon Mercer, who tried to “turn brother against brother.”
Being busy has given me an excuse not to call MarnieEvans back.
She sent a message: No matter what you decide, Sarah, you’ve already won. You built a life. You survived.
I want to believe her, but most days survival doesn’t feel like victory—it feels like dragging yourself across broken glass and calling it progress.
Bull fucking shit!
Guilt sits heavy inside of me. My therapist says it doesn’t belong to me, but that doesn’t change the fact that if I’d been louder, if Landon had been stoppedthen, so many girls might have been spared. The fact that he targets women who look like me makes me sick.
So I hide in my job. I’m avoiding people, even the kind ones.
Joy tests by threatening to drag me dancing. Elena stopped by to invite me to lunch. I turned her down.
I still see Mav and Aria because I’m their vet, but I’ve gone quiet, turned inward. They see it. They want to help. I don’t know how they can. I mean, if I knew how, I’d help myself.
I’ve even been avoiding Evie—timing my hours so I’m not at the clinic when she’s at Joy’s boutique. I barely know her, but those days caring for Bandit knitted us together, and I miss her. I love that kid—probably because she’s Cade’s, which makes her half him.
I still love him. I know that, and it makes me a prize fool.
The man who chose blood over me. Landon may have violated my body, but Cade desecrated my soul.
That girl who died by suicide, the one Marnie told me about—her blood is on both of us. Mostly on me. Iknew the truth about Landon. I should’ve pushed harder, gone above that deputy. I should’ve?—
These are the circular thoughts I’ve been whipping myself with.
I open a box of supplies.
Busywork helps until it’s time to fall asleep. Then it’s nightmares.
Therapy helps, but healing takes time. I’m talking to my therapist weekly because I’m in crisis.
I just finished a session, and like always, it opened more wounds to clean.
“You look exhausted, Sarah,” Dr. Leighton says gently. “How are you sleeping?”
My therapist’s calm face fills the Zoom window: tidy bun, soft cardigan, unshakeable. I wish I could borrow that steadiness.
A sharp, bitter laugh slips out. “Like shit! Landon’s still out there, raping girls—girls who look like me, who are eighteen, nineteen. And I—” My throat burns. “I could’ve stopped him. Ten years ago, I could’ve?—”
“Stop,” she says softly, firmly. “Listen to that language: could have. That’s guilt. You were nineteen. You were a victim.”
“If I’d screamed louder, told more people, maybe?—”
“Who believed you when you did tell?” she asks.
No one. Not Cade. Not Daddy. Not the deputy. Not my friends.
“That silence wasn’t yours,” she continues. “It was theirs. They failed you. They failed the others.”
Tears blur my computer screen. “But those girls?—”
