The call ended, and Cash watched his phone screen darken. The mood dropped, and Cash suddenly didn’t want to see anyone. He wanted pizza and to wallow in the silence in the house now that Lark had departed.
He looked out the windshield and sighed, then started up his truck and moved from this parking lot to the one closer to his grandparents’ condo. After all, he could ask them how they met and fell in love, and how he could know if he had too.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
Bailey looked around her house at the odds and ends that just needed to be scooped up and put in the last remaining box sitting on the counter. “I think that’s it,” she said.
Julie, her best friend at the clinic in Butte, went outside with a coat rack and Bailey’s DVD player. She’d forgotten she’d mounted that thing in the built-in entertainment center, and she’d had to send Jackson to the store to get tools, as hers had already been packed.
Honestly, she didn’t need a DVD player in Coral Canyon, as she’d be so busy establishing her new clinic, hiring help, and being swamped with family, she couldn’t imagine a quiet evening with a movie playing the way she often did here in Butte.
Jackson re-entered the house and swooped up the electronics cords and put them in the box.
Stephanie, Bailey’s next-door neighbor of the past fifteen years, stuffed one last thing in the trash bag and then tied it once. “I can’t believe you’re moving.”
Bailey could barely believe it herself. “I might come back,” she said, half-laughing and half-crying. “If I can’t get my clinic to take off there, I’ll come back.”
“Oh, you will not.” Stephanie moved over to her and hugged her. She was married to a great man, and they had three kids under the age of ten. She reminded Bailey so much of Bryce’s aunts and uncles, though they had ten years on her, but Stephanie had a big heart, and she welcomed everybody into her life.
Bailey had babysat for her a couple of times, and they often went to lunch when Bailey could get away from the clinic. She’d borrowed eggs from her when she needed to make cookies for her staff, and she’d taken Stephanie extra gallons of milk that she’d gotten from farmers as payment when she helped their cows.
She told herself it was okay to cry as Stephanie moved into her and hugged her. Tears streamed down Bailey’s face as she clung to the woman who had reminded her of how good life could be.
Stephanie cried too, and as they parted, Julie and Jackson joined the huddle. Bailey hugged them all, laughing now through her tears. “It’s going to be fine,” she said.
“And you’re not coming back,” Julie said. “Yousoldthe clinic.”
“I know.” Bailey nodded her head and wiped her nose with a tissue that Stephanie handed her. “And it’s good. This is good. This is what I need to do.”
“It sure is,” Jackson said, and together, the four of them left her house.
Her daddy had volunteered to come, bring her uncles, and they’d all help her move, but Butte was a long way from Coral Canyon, and Bailey hadn’t wanted him to do that. She was thirty-six years old, and she could handle the move herself.
She’d cleaned out her house a lot in the last few months, and everything had fit just fine in the twenty-foot moving truck, which would also tow her SUV to Coral Canyon. She could goslow, as she planned to take two days to get there by stopping in West Yellowstone for a night.
She squared her shoulders and told herself that she had done much harder things in her life than moving from one town to another. She gave her friends one more hug, and then watched as Julie and Jackson got in their vehicles, and Stephanie walked down the road to her house next door. Bailey put the key in the ignition of the moving truck and started it, the first leg of her journey finally beginning.
“You need this,” she said aloud to herself. “This is a whole new chapter for you, Bay.”
Yes, she was repeating something her mother had said, and while that probably would have irritated her to no end only a few years ago, now Bailey didn’t mind it so much. Her mother was a good woman who’d raised three children and been married twice. Once to a terrible man—Bailey’s father—who she hadn’t spoken to in thirty years. Graham Whittaker had literally saved them both, and Bailey’s gratitude for him knew no bounds.
Before she put the truck in reverse, she texted the group string that had her, her daddy, her momma, and both of her younger siblings on it:I’m all packed and loaded, and I’m heading out now.
The weather looks good, Momma said.You should be fine.
Text us when you get to Yellowstone, Daddy said.
Robbie sent celebration horns, and her youngest sister, Rita, said,Yay, yay, yay! I can’t wait until you’re here!
She wasn’t sure why Rita cared so much, as she didn’t live full time in Coral Canyon but attended a vocational school to become a chef in Jackson Hole. She only came home as often as Bailey did, as her training was quite intense, and she still had two years to go.
But Bailey sure loved being loved by them, and she promised everyone she would text them when she was safe and sound inWest Yellowstone. Then she pulled out of her driveway, feeling the SUV bump along behind her, and she got on her way toward a new future for herself…in the small town she swore she’d never return to.
Bailey finished pullingher SUV into her new garage in the house on the northern highway in Coral Canyon. The wind whipped across the front of her property, which faced north, the line of trees that acted as a windbreak on the west doing almost nothing against Mother Nature’s wrath. She jogged back to the moving truck and managed to back it up the narrow driveway, only having to pull forward and correct herself twice.
This driveway was much longer than the one in Butte, as her house sat back off the main highway about fifty yards. She liked that, as well as the mature landscaping in the front yard, which included a duck pond and plenty of tall trees, which would further block the vehicle noise from the road. In fact, when Bailey had come to look at the house, she hadn’t been able to hear it at all.
