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“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“That depends.”
I looked for something to throw at him.
“It might be fun to contest it,” he said casually, as if his life weren’t in danger. “Make you prove your points in court.”
I rolled my eyes. “Wyoming is a no-fault divorce state. I don’t have any points to prove.”
“Well, I have one.”
“And what’s that?” My hands went to my hips.
“You shouldn’t have filed for a fucking divorce in the first place, Mrs. Ford.”
“Well, you should have told me we were married in the first place,” I snapped.
Seb pressed his hands to his eyes. “I cannot have this conversation again. I cannot.”
“Fine,” I said because he had been making me a sandwich, and I wanted him to get back to that. “I love you. Do you want me to pull the divorce petition?”
“Maybe,” he hedged.
I blinked. “If you’re joking, that’s not funny, and if you’re not joking, I’m going to kill you.”
“Don’t kill me yet. Listen first, okay?” But he pushed the knife he’d used to slice tomatoes out of reach. “We have an opportunity to start fresh, if that’s what you want. Put our old marriage and all its hurts and hard feelings aside and begin again with a clean slate. We could go slow and easy. Date for a year. Get engaged. Throw a big wedding a year after that that our friends and family—” he paused, reconsidered. “Our friends, your family, and my brother actually attend. We could do things right.”
Immediate no. But…what did Seb want? Did he want to do things “right”? I chewed my lip. “It sounds…nice,” I ventured. “What’s the other option?”
“You withdraw the petition. We keep our marriage with all its ups and downs and growing pains, all the love and hurt, the mistakes, and the moments we failed and tried again, and we add in a few decades more.”
Hope bounded in my chest. “Yes,” I blurted. “I want all of that.”
“Yeah?” He studied me.
I nodded emphatically. “That’s what I want. That’s the life I built with you, and I don’t want a fresh start. I want the marriage that made us us.”
A smile bloomed on his face, slow and then all at once, like the sun coming over the mountain ridge. He pulled me in for a kiss, then pressed his cheek to mine.
“You and me…We made it. We’re exactly where we are supposed to be. We took the long way home, but we’re here now, and I wouldn’t trade that journey for anything.”
“That’s how I feel about it, too.”
And then I kissed him back.
EPILOGUE
SEB
Three Years Later
Hands on hips, I tilted my face to the sky, scowling as the blue-and-white Cessna made a casual loop around a low, puffy cloud, circling the airspace over the main lodge like it had nowhere in particular to be.
For the third fucking time.
“That’s Rhett’s plane, isn’t it?” Jeremiah asked, joining me on the porch.
