“I hear you,” I said, staring at the land like he might be standing out there with his thermos, squinting at problems like he could bully them into behaving. “I’ll choose.”
I rest my hand over the letter, palm pressing gently, like I could hold him in place for another second.
And I didn’t say what the choice was out loud.
Not yet.
But my body already knew.
Because for the first time since I’d come home, it didn’t feel like the ranch was a trap.
It felt like a place that had been waiting for me to stop running.
I gathered the pages carefully, folded them back into the envelope with hands that still trembled, and held it against my chest.
Then I sat there in the quiet kitchen for a long time, letting the truth settle into my bones, letting it hurt, letting it warm, letting it change the shape of everything.
While outside, the wind moved through the grass.
Reaching for my phone, I sent a text.
Me: Hey, can you have Jackson watch my animals for a bit?
Brooke: Sure, it’s no problem. Are you okay?
Me: Yeah, I just have to go to Calgary.
Brooke: You’ve got a permanent place here if you want it.
Me: Thanks.
Forty
Wyatt
The brewery usually settled me. Even on bad days, even when the fermenters ran a degree hot or a delivery showed up late, or a batch didn’t taste the way it should, there was a rhythm here I could lean on. Stainless steel. Clean lines. Honest work. If something went sideways, you could trace it back and fix it.
That morning, I’d been chasing that feeling like it was a rope I could grab before I went under.
I started before dawn, walking the floor with a coffee that’d gone lukewarm, checking valves and taps and inventory with the kind of focus that wasn’t focus at all. It was avoidance dressed up as responsibility. It was me trying to keep my mind on kegs and numbers instead of the quiet stretch of days where I hadn’t heard Tessa’s voice.
She asked me not to come around.
She hadn’t said it with cruelty, but it still landed like a gate slamming shut. I told myself it was fair. I’d told myself she needed space, and I wasn’t the sort of man who took a woman’s boundary and treated it like a suggestion. I’d told myself a hundred things, and most of them sounded gooduntil the nights hit and the valley went dark and my phone stayed silent.
By the time the sun climbed high enough to throw light through the big front windows, the place smelled like fresh mash and citrus cleaner and the faint metallic tang that clung to everything in a working brewery. It should’ve felt like home.
It didn’t. Not today.
I was at the bar with a clipboard in front of me, pretending I cared about a delivery schedule, when the front doorbell chimed.
We weren’t open yet. Only the staff came through that door before hours.
I didn’t look up right away. I heard boots on wood, slow and heavy, and my chest tightened before my brain caught up. Holt didn’t walk like he had time to spare. Holt didn’t come into town for no reason.
When I lifted my eyes, he was standing just inside the doorway, cap pushed back, jaw set like it was the only way he kept his teeth from grinding through each other. Dust clung to his jeans. His shirt was darkened with sweat at the collar.
He looked like a man carrying news he hated.
