Garnet Bend was teaching me what love looked like when it showed up without conditions, and the lesson was spread across my front yard in sawdust and paint and casserole dishes and children who didn’t belong to me but somehow did.
I chose my own name. I chose this town, this life, this man.
Sitting in that rocking chair with Logan’s arms around me and the sound of hammers carrying across my land, I finally understood that somewhere along the way, all of it had chosen me back.
I was home.
Epilogue
Five years later
Logan
The fence along the north boundary held tight when I tested the top rail. Cedar posts, set thirty inches deep, tamped and leveled and sealed against rot. I’d replaced the whole line two summers ago, and the wood had weathered to a silver-gray that looked like it had always been there.
I kept walking. Tova moved beside me at her own pace, which had slowed over the past year or so. Her muzzle had gone white and she didn’t chase the birds out of the pasture anymore, but she still made the morning walk with me every day. She’d position herself in whatever patch of sun was closest to wherever I was working, and I’d step over her four or five times before lunch.
The barn came into view as I crested the slight rise past the east paddock.
It was a damn good barn. Better than the one it replaced, if I was being honest. Fresh white paint, green trim that Lark hadpicked because she said it matched the original. The sign above the doors read PAWSITIVE CONNECTIONS in clean, even letters.
Lark had let the kids from the pediatric program paint it, which meant the S leaned slightly to the left and the O in CONNECTIONS was a little too big, and she’d told anyone who suggested fixing it that they could take their opinion and feed it to Clarence.
Because the most important thing about that barn was that it had been built in love.
Clarence was still alive. He was nearly fifty years old and knew twenty-three curse words now and had zero intention of dying before he’d learned the rest. The cats had shifted over the years, the way cats did, but Princess Whiskers was still on her top shelf drinking her filtered water and judging everyone who walked through the door.
Al Pacacino? One could only wish that spitting motherfucker would go gently into the good night. Duke, still around too.
I stopped at the far edge of the property where the land sloped toward the tree line. The access road was down there, overgrown now. Lark had asked the county to gate it off permanently, and they’d done it the same month the verdict came in. Carter Hollis got four years. His family’s lawyers had earned their money, and minimum security was a country club with a fence around it, but he was out of our lives and that was the only part that mattered.
The grants had been reinstated once the paper trail surfaced. Every door Carter had closed reopened when the people on the other side learned they’d been manipulated.
It didn’t happen fast. It took eighteen months of phone calls and documentation and Lark sitting across from foundation boards explaining what had been done to her without ever onceasking for pity. She’d presented facts, answered questions, and let Pawsitive’s work speak for itself.
Isaac’s loan had been paid back in full, with interest, because Lark had insisted on the interest even though Isaac had tried to refuse it twice. She’d mailed the final check with a photo she’d found of Gimbal wearing a birthday hat, and Isaac had called laughing so hard he couldn’t talk for the first thirty seconds.
Life was pretty damned good.
Tova caught a rabbit yesterday. She didn’t know what to do with it once she had it, so she just held it in her mouth and looked at me like I was supposed to handle the next part. Lark had to pry her jaws open. The rabbit was fine. Tova was insulted.
Sometimes I talked to Reid in the early light.
There was no schedule to it, no ritual. Some mornings, I’d walk past this spot and just keep going. Other mornings, I’d stop and say whatever I had to say, out loud, the way I would have said it if he’d been leaning against the fence post beside me with a beer he shouldn’t be drinking at six in the morning.
Tova’s ears twitched at her name. She was lying in the grass a few feet away, chin on her paws, watching me with those brown eyes that had seen me through every nightmare for five years. The nightmares still came. Not every night, not even most nights. But when they did, she was there before my hands had time to clench, her weight settling across my chest, her nose at my throat, steady and patient until I came back.
Other dreams had taken the nightmare’s place. Dreams about fence posts and feeding schedules and a woman who still couldn’t receive a compliment without changing the subject. Dreams about a boy with his mother’s green eyes who’d saidTovabefore he saidDada, which Lark brought up constantly and I would never hear the end of.
“You’d like it here,” I told Reid. “You’d give me shit about the alpaca and you’d let Clarence bite you because you’d think itwas funny, and Lark would have you on a horse inside of a week whether you wanted to be on one or not.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and looked at the mountains. The ridgeline was sharp against a sky that was turning from gray to pale blue, and the light was starting to hit the tops of the cottonwoods near the guest cabin.
“I’m sorry I was angry at you for so long. I understand it now better than I did. I don’t agree with it, and I’d give anything to have you standing here, but I understand that the dark got louder than everything else and I’m sorry I didn’t hear it in time.” I let that sit for a second. “I forgive you. And I miss you like hell. Every single day.”
Tova got up and pressed her head against my thigh. I dropped my hand to her ears and scratched the spot she’d been offering me since the night Lark put her in my cabin under the flimsiest excuse in the history of excuses.
“Come on, old girl. Chores.”
