Tomorrow, I'd chase the man I loved across half the country if that's what it took. Tomorrow, I'd be brave.
But tonight, I sat in the darkness and let myself feel everything I'd been running from. The fear. The hope. The terrible, exhilarating possibility that I might actually get what I wanted—if I was brave enough to reach for it.
"I'm coming, Jack," I whispered into the night. "All the way."
23
Jack
I drove north without a plan beyond direction.
The miles blurred together. Small towns passed without registering—gas stations, diners, feed stores where I stopped for coffee I didn't taste and conversation I didn't remember. Texas gave way to New Mexico, then Colorado, the landscape shifting from flat plains to rolling hills to mountains that cut against the sky like promises I wasn't sure I could keep.
Sully rode shotgun the way he always had, patient and watchful, pressing closer when I went too long without speaking. He knew something was wrong. He'd known since we left Copper Creek.
"I'm okay, Sul," I said, reaching over to rub his ears. The lie tasted familiar.
I picked up day work where I could along the way.
Fixing fence outside Amarillo for a rancher who didn't ask questions and paid in cash. Gentling a green-broke mare near Pueblo for a woman who'd bought a horse she couldn't handle and needed someone to teach it manners. Loading hay for a widow in Wyoming whose husband died last spring and whose sons lived too far away to help—she insisted on feeding medinner after, pot roast and mashed potatoes that reminded me so much of my mother's cooking I had to excuse myself before the tears came.
I worked hard. Slept in my truck. Kept moving.
But none of it felt right.
Every ranch I passed through reminded me of Copper Creek. The good ones, anyway—the ones with solid fences and healthy stock and families who worked the land together. I'd see a father teaching his son to rope, or a mother calling everyone in for supper, and my chest would ache with wanting.
And Maggie. Always Maggie.
I wondered if she'd found the note yet. If she'd woken up reaching for me and found only cold sheets. If she was angry or hurt or relieved.
I wondered if she'd come after me.
I hoped she would. I was terrified she wouldn't.
The note had been a gamble. I knew that. But I also knew Maggie. Knew that if I'd stayed, if I'd given her the chance to talk me out of leaving, she would have. And nothing would have changed.
So I'd left her the choice. Come all the way, or don't come at all.
Montana pulled at me the way it always had.
I felt it before I saw it—a tightening in my chest that had nothing to do with the altitude. The landscape shifted as I crossed the border, wider skies and sharper mountains, and air that smelled like pine and snow even in autumn. Home. This land had been home once, before it became a graveyard.
I was born here. Learned to ride before I could read. Spent summers helping my father work cattle and winters sitting by the fire while my mother read aloud from books she thought were too mature for me, and my father pretended not to notice. My sister used to chase me through the pastures, both of usshrieking with laughter, until one of our parents called us in for dinner.
Good memories. The best memories. All of them ending in the same place.
The turnoff appeared sooner than I expected.
A narrow road I used to know by heart, now overgrown at the edges, leading toward land that belonged to strangers now. My hands tightened on the wheel. I could keep driving. I'd done it before—passed this exit a dozen times in the years since, always finding a reason to keep moving.
But something was different this time.
Maybe it was losing Maggie. Maybe it was the Blackwoods showing me what family looked like when you actually let yourself be part of one. Maybe it was Sully pressing against my leg, Brad's dog, the last living piece of a man who told me once that running from grief only makes it faster.
“You gotta face it eventually, brother,” Brad had said after my family died. “Grief's like a rip current. You fight it, it drowns you. You let it take you, you end up somewhere you can breathe again.”
I'd been fighting it for six years. Maybe it was time to stop.
