Wyatt Dane. My brother. Standing twenty feet away in a flannel shirt and boots, looking at me across a patio full of strangers with the same expression I could feel on my own face.
He looked—different. Older, obviously. Broader through the shoulders than the last time I'd seen him, which had been—when? Three years ago? Four? A dirt runway in a country neither of us were supposed to be in, a cup of shit coffee shared between two men who had maybe forty-five minutes before their respective rides left in opposite directions.
We'd said the things you say when you don't know when you'll see someone again and you're too trained to acknowledge that you might not.Take care of yourself. Don't do anything stupid. Call Mom.Neither of us had called Mom. Neither of us had done anything except return to the machine and let it carry us further from each other and from everything we'd come from.
That was the regret that hit me now. Not the years of silence—though those sat heavy enough. The casual way we'd let the distance accumulate.
The texts that got shorter. The calls that got rarer. The birthdays that slid past with a message instead of a voice. We'd grown up in the same house, ridden the same horses, shared the same bunkroom where I'd told him to shut up from across the dark when he wouldn't stop talking. We'd eaten our mother's bread and ridden to Mexico for twenty-five-cent tequila and gotten our asses chewed when we got home. And then we'd scattered, the way the Valentine boys scattered—into the service, into the world, into lives that moved too fast and hit too hard for something as fragile as staying in touch to survive.
My fault as much as his. More, maybe. I was the stubborn one. The one who held on to the wrong things and let go of the right ones.
We stood apart for a moment. Two men on a patio, a lifetime of shared history compressed into a space that couldn't hold it, neither of us moving because the moment was too large for movement and too small for the distance it was trying to bridge.
Then, like two magnets that had been held apart by a hand that had finally let go, we came together.
The hug was—I don't have a word for it. Not the back-slapping, one-armed thing men did when they were being careful with their feelings. Full. Both arms. The kind where your body decides for you and your pride gets out of the way and you hold on because holding on is the only honest response to finding something you'd let yourself believe you'd lost.
I felt something else release in me. Another level. Another locked door swinging open in a chest that had been all locked doors for years. The stables had opened one. Louisa had opened another. And now Wyatt—my brother, my blood, the kid who used to talk too much and ride too fast and make me laugh when I was trying to be serious—had opened a third.
Like completing a mission. Checking a box I didn't know was on the list.
The men on the patio clapped. Not politely—with warmth, with recognition, the sound of people who understood what they were watching because they'd lived their own versions of it.
Marcus said something from across the patio—I didn't catch the words, something smartass, something that earned him a playful elbow from the woman beside him. Claire, I thought her name was. A few of the other women were elbowing their men, too, and I caught the gleam of a tear or two in the candlelight—women who'd watched their husbands find their own brothers and knew what the cost of that reunion looked like from the inside.
Wyatt pulled back. His eyes were bright. His jaw was working the way it did when he was holding something that didn't fit into language.
"Hey, Grant," he said again. Quieter this time. Like he was confirming I was real.
"Hey, Wyatt."
He exhaled. Laughed. A loose laugh—looser than I remembered from the dirt runway, from the forty-five-minute coffee, from any version of my brother I'd encountered in the last decade. Charleston had done something to him. Or someone had.
She was standing behind him. The copper-haired woman from the doorway—quieter now, holding space the way certain women did, the ones who understood when to be present and when to be peripheral. She had freckles and amber eyes and the patience of someone who'd learned that the man she loved came with complications and had decided the complications were worth it.
Something tugged at the back of my memory. The freckles. The copper hair. The way she stood—weight on one hip, chin slightly lifted, the posture of a girl who'd grown up around boys and had stopped letting them rattle her somewhere around the fifth grade.
"Grant," Wyatt said, turning slightly, "this is?—"
"Sophie Clarke," I said.
She blinked. Then the corners of her eyes creased—recognition landing, the smile that followed genuine and slightly stunned. "Grant Dane." She shook her head. "My God."
We'd been maybe fourteen and twelve, respectively, the last time I'd seen her—back when Valentine was the whole world and the Clarke place was two miles east and Sophie had been the girl who could outride most of the boys in the county and didn't see any reason to pretend otherwise. I hadn't known where she'd ended up. I hadn't thought to wonder. That was the thing about scattering—you stopped keeping track.
"Small world," I said.
"Smaller than you know," she said, with a look that suggested she'd already been briefed on exactly how small. She stepped forward, squeezed my arm once—the warm, unceremoniousgreeting of someone who'd known you before you were complicated—then caught Louisa's eye across the patio.
"I'll give you two a minute," she said, and was gone—the silent exchange between her and Louisa the kind that didn't require introduction, two women understanding each other across a room without needing to be told why.
Wyatt watched her go. Something on his face softened in a way I'd never seen on my brother before—the softening that happened to hard men when they looked at the person who'd made the hardness survivable.
Then he turned back to me.
I had too many questions. They were stacked up in my chest like a traffic jam—how, when, why, what the hell are you doing here, who are these people, how did they find you, how long have you been in Charleston, does anyone else know—and it was obvious from the look on Wyatt's face that he could see every one of them written across mine.
He laughed again. That loose laugh.
