“You—” I shook my head. “Three weeks?”
“Three weeks and four days.” Kaya grinned through her tears. “Not that I was counting.”
“You were counting.”
“I was absolutely counting. Every day I had to not tell you was agony.” She squeezed my hands. “But it was worth it. Look at your face right now. That’s the face I’ve been working toward.”
I pulled her back into a hug, and this time I held on longer, because Kaya wasn’t just my employee or my trail guide, she was a friend. A real friend. She was the person who’d known me at my worst. Who’d watched me build something and lose it and never once treated me like I was broken. Who’d spent three weeks sleeping in a house that wasn’t hers, organizing a barn for a woman who didn’t know it existed, because that’s what family does.
“Thank you,” I said into her shoulder. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Don’t you dare thank me.” Her arms tightened. “This is my ranch too. You just happen to own it.”
When I finally let go, Graham was standing a few feet back, watching the three of us with an expression I’d never seen on him before. Not smug, though he had every right to be. Not satisfied. Quieter than that. The look of a man seeing the finished version of something he’d been building in the dark, not knowing if it would hold.
It held.
I walked back to him and took his face in my hands and kissed him. Not the slow, shaking kiss from the barn. This one was sure. This one was a woman who finally understood what she’d been given, and it wasn’t a ranch or horses or a ring.
It was a life she thought she’d lost. Every piece of it. Handed back by a man who loved her enough to rebuild it without knowing if he’d be part of it.
“Come on,” I said, pulling back. “I want to show Kaya the ring.”
“She already knows about the ring,” Graham admitted. “She helped me get it resized.”
I looked at Kaya. She shrugged, completely unrepentant.
“I told you,” she said. “I know everything.”
Hank pushed off the fence and headed toward the barn, already pulling on his work gloves. “I’ll start evening feed.”
“Hank.” I caught his arm. “It can wait ten minutes.”
He looked at me. Looked at the barn. Looked back at me.
“Five,” he said.
I laughed again, and this time it didn’t come out broken at all.
We closedthe barn doors together as the light faded. All four of us, because that’s how it was going to be now.
The mountains were going dark against a sky full of stars, more stars than I’d seen in weeks, because New York doesn’t believe in darkness and Colorado has never heard of light pollution. The air smelled like pine and grass and the particular cold that comes down from the peaks after sunset.
Graham stood beside me. My hand in his. His grandmother’s ring on my finger. Hank and Kaya behind us, Kaya alreadytalking about trail maps and booking systems and where to put the arena, Hank responding with the occasional “Mmhm” that meant he’d already figured it out and was just letting her catch up.
The barn was quiet behind us. Four horses, fed and watered and settled. The sound of Brutus shifting in his stall. Starlight’s soft exhale. The rhythmic crunch of Cassie working through her hay. And somewhere in the last stall, Ricky breathing slow and even, calm in a way he’d never been in a new place before.
Because it wasn’t a new place. Not really. Not anymore.
Home.
EPILOGUE
ROSE
Two years later
I woke up calm.
