Cal touched my arm. "Wait here."
I watched him cross the bay, watched Liam hang up and say something I couldn't hear. Cal's expression shifted. Shock, then something else. Concern, maybe. The kind of look you got when someone told you something you didn't know how to fix.
"That's in three months," I heard Cal say.
Liam just shook his head, looking like someone had pulled the ground out from under him.
They talked in low voices for a few more minutes, Cal's hand on Liam's shoulder, that silent firefighter solidarity that said I'm here without needing words. Then Cal came back to me, his expression troubled.
"What happened?" I asked.
"Liam's grandmother passed. The ranch goes to him, but..." He ran a hand through his hair. "There's a clause in the will. He has to be married by his thirtieth birthday to inherit."
I stared at him. "That's..."
"Ninety days away. Yeah."
I looked back at Liam, still standing where Calhad left him, staring at his phone like it had betrayed him. Liam, with his easy grin and his terrible jokes and the grief he hid behind both. He'd been engaged once, I knew. It had fallen apart a few months before I came back to town, and he never talked about it.
"What's he going to do?"
Cal shook his head. "I don't know. I don't think he knows."
We drove home in silence, Gabrielle sleeping between us, and I thought about Liam's face. The devastation in it. The impossibility of what he was facing.
The next morning, I was opening the café when Riley walked in.
She looked exhausted. More exhausted than usual, which was saying something for a woman who worked 24-hour shifts and raised a twelve-year-old on her own. There were shadows under her eyes, and she was holding an envelope in her hands like it might bite her.
"Coffee?" I asked.
She nodded, sliding into a booth near the window. I brought her usual, black with two sugars, and set it down in front of her.
"You okay?"
Riley looked up at me, and I recognized the expression on her face. Fear. The bone-deep kind thatsettled into your chest and made it hard to breathe. I'd worn that expression myself, not so long ago.
"Custody hearing," she said quietly. "For Mia."
I slid into the booth across from her. "What?"
"Some social worker decided a single twenty-six-year-old isn't stable enough to raise a kid. Never mind that I've been doing it for four years." Her jaw tightened. "They want to review the guardianship. And the lawyer says... he says a two-parent household would be advisable."
The word came out bitter, sharp-edged.
"Riley."
"I've raised her since she was eight years old, Lucy. Since Mom died and there was no one else. I've worked double shifts and gone without sleep and given up everything to make sure she's okay." Her voice cracked. "And now they want to take her away because I don't have a husband?"
I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. I didn't know what to say. Didn't know how to fix something this broken.
Two people. Two impossible situations.
I thought about Liam at the station last night, staring at his phone. I thought about Riley now, gripping that envelope like a lifeline. Both of them facing deadlines they couldn't meet, problems they couldn't solve alone.
I didn't know yet how their stories would collide. Didn't know that the solution to both their problems might be sitting right in front of them, hidden in plain sight.
But I knew something was coming. Something that would change everything.
