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He grinned. “Good. We’ll start tomorrow. It’s about time you got your lazy ass off the couch.”

“Hey! I’m recovering from a literal stab wound.” I aimed a teasing kick at his knee with one fuzzy-socked foot, but Seb captured my ankle.

“Careful. I know your ticklish spots.”

But he also must have remembered how much I loathed being tickled, because with a gentle squeeze, he released me without making good on his threat. He pushed away from the railing. “You want a sandwich? We still have some of the good bread left.”

The “good bread” was specially ordered from a gluten-free bakery in Portland. It had shown up about a week after I did. “Sure, thanks.”

I leaned over to grab my phone and caught my reflection in its glossy surface. My lips were curved up in a sweet, happy smile. I hadn’t even realized I was doing it, but I knew why. It was him. Because sitting out here with him, it felt like the old days. We had always been each other’s biggest supporters. From the moment we met, it was like we were best friends who wanted to fuck.

It hit me then, staring at my smiling face. A tidal wave of grief.

I missed him. I missed us.

12

LILA

The ten months we were together, I saw many different sides of Seb, and I thoroughly enjoyed every single one. There was Vacation Seb, the version of him I had met first on the beach in Crete: deceptively laid-back, teasing, allergic to shirts. Adventure Seb liked to fuck at the end of a hair-raising activity before the adrenaline wore off. Business Seb looked hot in a suit and hotter still when he tore off his tie and bound me to the bedposts.

But this Seb…I had never seen him like this.

Cowboy Seb might be the iteration that killed me.

It was bad enough that his Wranglers looked like they had been custom-made for his ass, but when he pushed up the sleeves of his forest-green Henley and spun the brim of his baseball cap backward, I nearly combusted on the spot.

“Every October, we send out the cowboys to round up the cattle from public grazing land and bring them home to the ranch. We spend the next week weighing the calves and determining which ones are going to market and which are fattening up for another year,” Liam said, pulling my attention to him.

It might have been the most words he’d ever said to me. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the loud mooing of mamas protesting the taking of their babies. “Alex and Mateo will separate the calves from their mamas, herd them into the chute to get them on the scale over there, and then send them on their way. The calves going to market will stay in the smaller hayfield, or they’ll go to the bigger winter pasture if they need another year.”

While Liam explained the process, my camera was out and ready, aimed at the shaggy brown heads dotting the golden pasture. Blue mountains provided a jagged horizon, the perfect backdrop for the cowboys circling the herd on horseback. I could not stop smiling.

My camera kept finding Seb. Seb’s strong hands gripping a coil of rope. The veins on his forearms. The notch of his throat exposed by his unbuttoned collar. Seb laughing with Mateo. Seb showing Tyrone how to use a lasso, using a fence post for practice. Seb calming a nervous mother as her calf got weighed—that melted me into a pile of goo like an ovulating woman watching her boyfriend hold a newborn baby. My camera loved him.

“The babies are cuter than I thought they’d be,” Ezra, one of the ranch guests, remarked. “I’m starting to feel bad about hamburgers.”

“We have incisors for a reason,” Holly said, breezing by. For once, she did not have Mother Clucker with her.

Seb glanced up. A person who didn’t know him well might think that quick flick of his gaze over Ezra hadn’t told him much, but I knew better. Seb never missed a detail, and he had an uncanny way of reading people. I slowly lowered my camera.

“You should feel bad,” Seb said.

Ezra blinked, startled. “What?”

“You should feel bad. I feel bad, too. It fucking sucks, taking a life. Even when it’s necessary, it still fucking sucks. If taking a life feels good to you, there’s probably something wrong with you. But I don’t think the goal in this life is to feel good. I think it’s to do good. So that’s what we do here. We care for the animals with respect and end their lives as humanely as we can. The sale of the beef is what keeps this ranch running and allows us to run the non-profit.” Seb lifted a shoulder. “Plus, I happen to like steak. That makes it worth it to me. But maybe it’s not worth it to you. That’s all right, too. Everyone should ask themselves those questions. But we don’t all have to land on the same answers.”

Ezra nodded, swallowing hard.

Suddenly, I understood that Seb wasn’t just talking about the pros and cons of going vegetarian. Ezra had seen combat. The things he had done, the things he had seen, they weighed on him. That was why he was here. On a micro level, ranch life asked a similar moral question he’d had to consider as a soldier: what was a life worth?

Seb’s gloved hand landed on Ezra’s shoulder. They paused for a moment, and my fingers twitched on my camera, but it didn’t feel right to capture such a private moment.

Ezra headed toward Holly. Seb watched him a moment longer, rubbing his chest absently, and I watched Seb.

“Hey,” I said softly.

He looked at me.