“The clinic is mine. Fully. Dad left everything to me.”
“We know,” I tell her. “After everything... We assumed you’d keep it running.”
I will,” she confirms. “But… I have a life in New York. A practice. Friends. A lease.”
My stomach drops.
“What are you saying?” Seth asks.
She looks at him. Then at me.
“I want to go back.”
The words hit the porch like a bomb.
“Go back?” Tex asks. “To New York?”
“Yes,” she says. “I can’t just… stay here forever. I have responsibilities. A career. Clara has her job there. Her boss has been more than lenient.”
“You’re a vet,” I say. My voice is hollow. “You can have a career here.”
“I built something there, Billy,” she insists. “I built it from scratch. Without my dad. Without you.”
She stands up. She wraps her arms around herself.
“I’m not abandoning the clinic,” she says. “I’ll hire a manager. Maybe sell it eventually. But I can’t stay in Prairie Pine.”
“Why not?” Seth asks, and he stands up too. He looks hurt. “I thought… after yesterday… after this morning…”
Sedona flinches. “Seth, this morning was… it was nice. It was real. But a kiss doesn’t undo five years. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m not the same girl who left.”
She looks at us.
“I’m not ready to be the girl who stays,” she says.
I stare at her.
I feel like the ground has been ripped out from under me. I just gave her up. I just told her to choose someone else. I just tore down my walls.
And she’s leaving anyway.
“You’re leaving,” I say. It’s a statement.
“I have to,” she says. “For me.”
The irony tastes bitter on my tongue. She left because she wanted more. She came back because of death.
And now she’s leaving again because she found herself.
And I’m standing here, holding a mug of coffee, realizing that I’ve spent five years holding onto a ghost, only to let her go the second she became real.
“Okay,” I say.
They all look at me.
“Okay?” Tex asks.
“When?” I ask.
