Matthew handed her two dishtowels. “Do you want to walk across to Nathan and Amy’s house? Catherine called to say she made a cake for dessert.”
Ashley shook her head. “I’ll visit them another day. I have to finish my story.”
Sean’s gaze landed on Matthew. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking.
Matthew could already feel the first nail being driven into his coffin. Showing Ashley how he felt hadn’t made any difference to her decision to leave. The sooner her story was finished, the faster she could leave.
“I’ll go with you to Nathan’s house,” Sean said into the heavy silence filling the room.
Matthew picked up his hat and headed out the back door. He thought Ashley might have considered staying in Bozeman, but he’d forgotten how determined she could be. Nothing would stop her from moving onto bigger and better things. Not even a love-sick cowboy who should have known better.
***
Later that night, Ashley stared at her cell phone. The number in her contact list glowed in the semi-darkness, daring her to tap the screen and talk to her dad.
She hadn’t spoken to him in a long time. After she’d left Bozeman, she focused on her own life, on the career she was desperate to build. Letting the days slip into weeks, then into months before calling him, had been easy. She kept telling herself they were busy people, that they both had lives that didn’t leave a lot of time for each other. But that was baloney.
She’d purposely kept her distance. Her mom had been the glue that stuck their small family together. While she was alive, it was easy to overlook her dad’s black and white view on life. In his eyes, you worked hard, earned a good income, and gave back to the community.
You didn’t run off to a city thousands of miles away and follow a dream. That would only lead to disaster, and that’s how her father saw her life—one big disaster after another.
“Are you memorizing those numbers or calling someone?”
Ashley’s eyes connected with Matthew’s. “I thought I’d talk to dad.”
Matthew didn’t say anything. He knew her relationship with her father could only be described as rocky, at best.
She left her phone on the porch and looked at the stars. “Do you remember the time you took me stargazing at Big Sky?”
He sat beside her. “You brought a book from the library on constellations. We must have sat outside for hours, peering at the sky.”
Instead of being a happy memory, Ashley felt the weight of what had come next. A few weeks later, she’d left Bozeman and hadn’t come back. Until now.
Matthew pointed to the stars. “There’s the Big Dipper.”
“And Sagittarius.” She tried to remember the names of more constellations. But the only thing she remembered was the incredible loneliness she’d felt each time she’d done the same thing in New York.
Matthew broke the silence between them. “I’ll go inside if you want to call your dad.”
Ashley shook her head. “I’d appreciate you staying. It could be a quick conversation. I haven’t spoken to him in so long that he’s probably forgotten who I am.”
Her attempt to lighten the mood didn’t work. An awareness she’d never felt with anyone else made her feel even more uncomfortable. It was almost as if she was twenty-three years old again, staring at the stars and imagining the rest of her life without Matthew.
“Why did you do it, Ashley? Why did you leave so suddenly?”
She looked down at her hands. “I’d been thinking about leaving Bozeman for a long time. While I was working at the Chronicle, I applied for a junior position at two newspapers in New York. I didn’t think I’d be offered either job, butThe Daily Timesinterviewed me. They wanted someone who could start straight away.”
In a cruel twist of fate, her first day of work had been on Matthew’s birthday. She’d said goodbye to him the week before, knowing she may have turned her back on the most important person in her life.
Matthew shifted on the wooden stair. “After you left, your dad called me a few times.”
“He did?”
“He wanted to know if I’d heard from you.”
Ashley bit her bottom lip. “I only called him a few times.”
“At least you talked to him.” The bitterness in Matthew’s voice was thick with unspoken memories.
