They’d eaten sandwiches over the kitchen island, the space between them occupied by the ghost of the afternoon’s adrenaline. Grant had been brief, his questions about her riding history clipped and precise, his eyes never quite settling on hers for more than a second. He was retreating into himself, back to the stoic rancher who didn’t have room for complications.
Izzy had let him. She’d gone to bed early, her muscles humming with a fatigue she hadn’t felt in years.
When she woke, the bill for yesterday’s heroics had come due. Her thighs felt like they’d been hammered into lead, and a sharp, nagging ache radiated from her lower back every time she reached for her coffee. She moved with a stiff, gingerly grace that made her feel more like eighty than thirty-one, but the soreness felt honest—a physical reminder that she still knew how to hunt down a thrill.
By afternoon, however, the stiffness couldn’t outweigh the pull of the trail. The ride. The speed. The way it had felt—easy and familiar in a way nothing else had in a long time.
She found Ghost again.
Now that they knew she could ride a horse, Izzy had been granted permission to ride Ghost whenever he was free from lessons, as long as she promised no jumping or dramatic chases.
It felt marvelous to be on a horse again.
The smell of the farm and the breeze through the trees took her straight back to Colorado at seventeen—to expensive tack, early mornings, and a trainer she’d once mistaken for love.
She laughed to herself.
The trail narrowed the farther she rode.
Fence line gave way to trees. Gravel softened into dirt, then into something barely marked at all.
Izzy let the horse pick his way forward. The vegetation grew thicker.
It was quiet out here. A flash of memory hit her—another trail, another quiet stretch of woods. Evan’s voice.
She shoved it away.
She almost missed it.
The cabin sat tucked back off the rise, half-hidden behind a stand of trees, weathered gray and settling into the land like it had been there longer than anything around it. Thick vines crawled up the walls and across the sagging porch rail, choking the posts, while brambles and undergrowth pressed in tight around the foundation, almost swallowing the lower half of the structure.
One corner of the roof had dipped.
The back side sagged just slightly. Not abandoned long enough to disappear.
But long enough to be forgotten.
Izzy slowed.
Then stopped.
Something about it pulled.
She swung down, looped the reins over the hitching post out front, and stepped toward the door.
It stood open.
“Hello?” she called lightly.
Nothing answered.
She pushed the door. It groaned, a heavy, protesting sound that echoed too loudly in the hollow space.
Dust. Old wood. And a quiet, unsettled feeling, like the room was still waiting for someone who never came back.
Izzy stepped inside, her boots clicking on the floorboards. The light came in thin through the windows, catching suspended particles that hadn’t been disturbed in a generation.
It wasn’t just empty; it was interrupted.
