"Okay?"
"When I get back to Texas." His hand came up to push my hair back. "We figure it out then."
I searched his face. He meant it.
"Okay," I said.
He pressed his mouth to my forehead and lay back and pulled me against his chest. I listened to his heartbeat and thought about six months and thought about Texas…and then I thought about his hands and his voice andbe good for meand felt the specific particular ache of wanting something you couldn't have yet.
The horses were quiet outside.
The stars hadn't moved.
I was leaving in a few hours.
I closed my eyes and held on and let myself have tonight.
FIVE
Sawyer
We didn’t work it out.
I stayed in New Mexico after Daniela left…we texted a bit, sweet and affectionate at first. It was nice, for a while.
But six months of separation is alongtime when you’re trying to turn a one-night stand into something more. And we just didn’t have it in us…particularly because I was in an established career, busy as always, and because Daphne Wilder’s star was rising.
I'd watched it happen from a distance. Hard not to—her agent was good at his job and Daphne Wilder was everywhere by October. An interview with a big film influencer. A red carpet at some LA premiere where she wore something green that I saw on my phone at eleven at night in a New Mexico trailer and stared at longer than I should have.
The texts had slowed down around then. Neither of us made a decision about it. It just—stopped. Like a creek going dry in August. One day there's water and then one day there isn't and you can't point to the exact moment it changed.
I told myself it was fine. Made sense. She was building something and I was the horse master on a film she'd wrapped in June, and Millie's family, and nobody's love story.
I came back to Briar Hill in December and unpacked my trailer and checked on my horses and helped Gage with the back fence and didn't think about it.
Mostly.
Sunday dinners at the main house had been a thing since Forrest came home in 2020. Aunt Peg had started it—showed up one Sunday with enough food for eight people, looked around at all of us rattling around the property like loose change, and just kept coming until it stuck. Nobody argued with Peggy Holt about anything, and nobody wanted to.
Now it was standing. Wyatt and Haven walked over from the little house with Ethan on someone's hip. Dakota materialized from the guest room looking like a man who'd been asleep since Thursday. Gage was always already up with Millie and Bea and Blaise, in various states of disarray.
And Forrest came up from the cottage.
Forrest, who I was most worried about.
That was the thing I checked every Sunday without meaning to—whether the cottage light was on, whether he was already at the table when I got there, whether he was eating or just moving food around his plate. Two years since Sophie. He was functional. He was present. He showed up, did his work, said the right things at the right times.
He wasn't okay.
I knew the difference because I'd known him his whole life. Forrest had been ten when we lost Mom and Dad. I'd been thirteen. Old enough to understand what a car accident meant, young enough that the understanding had taken years to settle into something I could carry. Forrest had done his grieving quietly, the way he did everything, and I'd watched him do it and not known how to reach him then either.
Some things didn't change.
Uncle Adam and Aunt Peg had taken us in without making a production of it—just folded us into the house like we'd always been there, which was the Holt way. Gage had been eighteen and already running the ranch like he'd been doing it for years. Wyatt had been sixteen and already half gone to whatever interior place he lived in. Dakota had been four and hadn't understood any of it.
We'd figured it out. More or less.
I stopped by the cottage on the way over from my trailer and found Forrest sitting on the porch steps, petting one of the goats. Dolly had really taken to him; mostly because he’d been bribing her for months with her favorite snack, goat-shaped animal crackers. I sat down on the step next to him and Dolly ignored me completely, continuing to take animal crackers straight from Forrest’s palm.
