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With her, something in him whispered.

Dallas was walking around the house and peering in the windows, though Finn had to keep checking that with his eyes because his brother, the former Army Ranger, was soundless. Finn stayed where he was, though he turned in a big circle, taking in the land around him. Maybe ten acres, he estimated. A lot of opportunity to experiment.

Finn could see why Dallas liked this place. He could hear birds singing in the trees and the air up here was cool and sweet. But he still felt something curiously like grief as he thought about what it would mean to do this. To buy land here.

To buy land that he would never ranch on, but would try growing on, for a change. It would be a shift, but Finn had always liked a challenge and better yet, he knew land. He understood cycles of growing. He knew how to keep fragile things alive. And he certainly wasn’t afraid of hard work.

But it meant that he was really and truly accepting what had happened back in Colorado. He was accepting it and letting it go.

He felt that hollow, grieving place in him open up again. Helena was wrong—it wasn’t depression. But it wasn’t good for him, either. He knew that.

Finn looked back out at the fields here in this tucked-away little piece of mountain paradise. He took a deep breath and felt the mountains all around him, and thought about how it would feel to work this place with nothing but Montana sky above and the hills on all sides keeping it hidden and safe.

This was a good place. He could feel it. And it already felt like his.

It wasn’t as if all of those years fell away, or Colorado meant nothing to him now, but the only thing he could really focus on was the idea of bringing Kitty here and showing her that they could do a lot more together than just pretend.

That shocked him too. He didn’t know when things had shifted, or maybe they hadn’t. Maybe he’d never really been on board with her fake marriage idea. Maybe he’d just wanted her, and took her any way he could get her.

Finn found that when he thought about it that way, it made sense.

Just like this farm did.

Dallas came back around from behind the house, and stood next to Finn, looking down the gentle slope of the fields toward the tree line. “It’s as pretty up here as I remember,” he said. “And the house has good bones. As far as I can tell, no one has broken in, either. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could turn the key, walk inside, do a little dusting, and feel right at home.”

“That would be something,” Finn agreed. Meaning he was already planning it all out. He clapped Dallas on the shoulder. “I don’t do anything in haste. No matter what it looks like.”

Dallas nodded. “Noted.” Then he grinned. “But it looks like you might be sticking around, doesn’t it?”

Finn laughed. “Sure does.”

Then they drove back down into Cowboy Point again and made Raleigh serve them a cold beer at the Copper Mine to wash down the adventure and the possibility of new beginnings. Finn thought it tasted pretty sweet.

Later he found himself walking down the main road as the evening grew cooler and quieter. He could hear the band playing at Mountain Mama’s. There was a scrum of people waiting outside Crowded Table and the lot next to it was full of cars he didn’t recognize. Finn knew that probably meant that it was folks up from Marietta, and maybe even as far away as Livingston or Bozeman. Maybe even up from Jackson Hole.

People in this part of the world were willing to drive a long way to have an excellent meal in good weather.

The Copper Mine had been hopping when he left. Summer meant that a lot of seasonally empty buildings along Main Street were full and open late. There were those artists who called themselves a collective and set up pop-ups in the fields. The Martins of High Gully Ranch bred alpacas on their ranch and had started High Gully Yarn this summer in one of the usually empty buildings. They were calling it a pop-up, but Finn knew that the Bennett sisters thought their enthusiasm for artisan dyes and fiber arts of all kinds would lead to something more permanent.

Cowboy Point was already different from the little town he’d found when he’d come here in winter. Finn liked the seasonal aspect of it. The ebb and flow of light and dark, super local to fully touristy and back again.

He liked that there were people strolling in the sweet summer air even though it was getting late. There were other food trucks now, many of them parked in the lot where his sister’s coffee cart was. A lot of folks who lived up in canyons like the one he’d visited today set up farmstands at the bottom of their little roads in the summer, selling produce, or crafts, or anything else they could think up.

Like the sourdough lady whose bread was so good that Kitty had told him she found herself arguing over loaves with the Crowded Table girls.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that if he made the farming thing work, Finn might be able to add to the summer bounty. That would interest him even if it wasn’t thinking about Kitty and what she might need.

But who was he kidding? The only thing he ever thought about was Kitty.

He made his way into the usual high-energy crowd at Mountain Mama’s. On nights like this, they spilled out into the street. Local bands took turns playing all summer long, and tonight’s act was delivering rock and roll. The people were loving it, laughing and dancing from the patio and nearly out into the road.

But the funniest thing to Finn’s mind was that as he nodded at the faces he recognized, they nodded back.

This was the kind of thing that would make his father pack them all up and get them on the road again. The minute anyone knew their names or felt comfortable enough with them to say hello? That meant they were on the move.

If he stopped to think about it too much, it was likely that Finn was never going to come to any kind of good terms with the fact that his father had settled here, where everybody knew him. When he made sure that while he was with his other, secret family, no one could really get to know them. He’d kept them nomadic and had insisted they keep to themselves.

Meanwhile there had been all of this that they could have been a part of.