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To figure out what it meant to be both the Ruthie she’d been before the accident and the Ruthie she’d been before this morning.

She made herself walk away, through his adorable little cottage and into the inn itself. Then she rushed down the hall through the farmhouse with its empty, pretty rooms and climbed that spiral stair. This time she went past her room and kept going until she could stand there in the light room and peer out at the sun as it rose in the east.

She remembered everything.

Ruthie remembered the way it had felt to wait for him while he was deployed. To do her very best to keep her mind off all the awful possibilities. She had done her best to distract herself, but it didn’t always work.

And she knew that some wives shared those things with their men. But she never had. When she got to talk to him, she was always funny. Sweet. As bright as possible.

Only when they hung up would she cry.

Now she thought about what he’d said when he’d shown her all those pictures, that maybe the life they’d built only made sense because they’d spent so much time apart. And probably, they should have worked on that instead of pretending to be too fine when they weren’t. And then taking all of these years away from each other after one bad fight.

She remembered, so she knew now that she’d certainly contributed to that messy night that had torn them apart. Ruthie had known exactly how messed up he was. She’d known that he was refusing to get any help. When they’d come here to Montana, she hadn’t had time to think about whether or not she thought Cowboy Point was beautiful, or if the two of them could be happy here.

That summer she’d been too busy worrying that he was a powder keg, because he was. And she’d worried he might blow at any moment. Like he was that caldera beneath Yellowstone, just looking for a reason to explode.

Not that anything could ruin the beauty of Montana, she supposed. But it certainly hadn’t been any kind of vacation.

And she remembered exactly what she’d been feeling that night. When she’d sat there calmly, watching him wind up tighter and tighter, having no idea that this was the night that would break them.

She told him that she wanted a baby because she’d felt self-righteous about it. Like it was time for him to wake up. Like it was time that they moved on to something else.

Like she was the one who should tell him how to be a grown-up, after all the things he’d seen and done. While she’d just…waited for him to come home.

And she wondered, now, if she’d known that that was going to be the thing that made him crack at last. She kind of thought she did. Maybe she’d gotten that from all those years of making sure that she never bothered anybody. Because she was an orphan. And because she’d lived with her grandmother, who was not the sort of woman to be needled by anyone.

Ruthie was pretty sure she’d deliberately started that fight, so at least they could clear the air.

But they’d never fought about anything.

And it turned out, they sucked at fighting.

Looking back, she could see that they sucked at pretty much all of it. They were great at sex. It was like their bodies had been fashioned specifically to drive each other wild, so they did that. As often as possible.

But then, he was away for months at a time. And she got used to her alone time. She got used to being able to give herself to him completely and then recalibrate when he was gone.

Six months after he was done with the Army, she was the one who was completely uncalibrated. Maybe he was too. But neither one of them had possessed the vocabulary to discuss that at twenty-five. Ruthie had to think that it was a piece of very good luck that they hadn’t thrown a child into the middle of that.

A baby would have been a Molotov cocktail of emotions and hormones in the middle of their already dire form of communication.

She stood there and stared out the windows as the sun asserted itself in the cool blue December sky. The mountains on all sides were capped with snow and rolled out like a painting, no end in sight. Eternal.

It was so beautiful, it hurt.

That was how she’d felt about him, too. So beautiful that of course it hurt.

It had never occurred to her to question whether or not that was healthy.

Ruthie heard a noise behind her and turned, knowing that it would be him. He looked a little wild, and she understood immediately.

“I didn’t run away,” she assured him. “I just wanted to see the sunrise.”

“I thought maybe I dreamed it,” he said, his voice rough.

Dallas came closer. He pulled her straight into his arms and got his mouth on hers.

He kissed her, and it was filthy and sweet and them. Then he pulled back, making that gorgeously greedy noise right there against her mouth.