I passed the wine rack on my way to the pantry, the way I passed it every day, and kept walking. The grapes in the vineyard wouldn’t be ready for harvest for months.
The starter trays in the greenhouse were just beginning to show their first true leaves, the plants still too young to tell if they’d take to Montana soil the way the Belize variety was supposed to.
I had time on that front. Months of it, before the first pressing, before the first bottling, before the first taste of wine made from grapes I’d planted with my own hands on land I’d chosen specifically for the purpose.
I didn’t have much time on the other front. Tomorrow, if Rawley’s timeline was right. Tomorrow, Cruz would be back at the ranch, would make his way to the farmhouse the way he always did, would knock on the door with that combination ofcertainty and care that had caught me off guard the first time and still did, six months later.
Tomorrow, the conversation I’d spent six weeks unable to figure out how to start would start itself, whether I was ready or not.
By the time the chicken was in the oven and the light outside had gone gold and low, I was standing at the kitchen counter with one hand resting on my stomach again.
I hadn’t put it there on purpose—it just ended up there, the way it did a dozen times a day now, drawn to the curve that hadn’t existed three months ago and now seemed like it had always been part of me.
The baby moved, that same small, insistent pressure, a roll rather than a kick this time. I stood very still in the quiet of the kitchen, one hand on the counter, the other on my stomach, and watched the light change outside the window.
Cruz was coming home. He would come to the farmhouse because he always came to the farmhouse. Would knock on the door the way he always did. Would stand on the porch with that look in his eyes that I still couldn’t quite read.
And I would have to find the words for what had happened—for the tests and the results and the truth that had been growing inside me for three months without my permission or participation. Would have to hand him an ultrasound image and a blood-work panel and the complete unraveling of everything he thought he knew.
Or I wouldn’t. Would stand on the porch with my hand on my stomach and my eyes on his face, and would watch him put it together himself—the silence, the avoidance, the way I was standing that made it impossible to miss what was happening.
Either way, it would start tomorrow.
Either way, everything would change.
Somewhere in the world, Cruz was on a plane headed for Montana, for the ranch, for whatever came next.
I stood in the kitchen with my hand on my stomach and my eyes on the darkening valley, and waited for tomorrow to arrive.
Chapter Ten
~ Cruz ~
I lasted exactly until dawn. Four hours of sleep after forty-eight hours of travel, and I was up, dressed, and halfway to the truck before I’d fully decided to go. Sterling had tried to stop me—“At least shower first, Jesus Christ”—but I’d waved him off, already climbing into the driver’s seat.
The ranch was coming awake around me, early morning light spilling across the eastern pasture, but I couldn’t wait for full morning. Not with Jackson’s house sitting just down the road, silent for six weeks.
Rawley had left the keys in the ignition—a habit that would get you killed in most of the places I’d worked, but standard procedure on a Montana ranch where the distance between help and emergency was measured in miles, not minutes.
I backed the truck out of its parking spot with more speed than precision, the wheels kicking up gravel that pinged against the undercarriage.
Six weeks of silence. No texts, no calls, no contact of any kind from the moment I’d stepped onto the plane for Istanbul. The thread between us had gone completely dead—not the gradual slowing of responses that happened when one of us was busy, but complete, deliberate absence.
I ran through the list the way I ran through operational problems—systematically, without flinching from the worst-case scenario.
Jackson regretted the five weeks we’d spent together. It had been situational—close proximity, shared danger, the intensity that came with the Peterson situation resolved. Nothing that would last once I was gone and he had time to think.
He’d met someone. Someone local, someone who didn’t disappear for months at a time, someone who could give himwhatever it was he’d been looking for when he let me into his bed.
He was simply done. Had reached the end of whatever it was between us and didn’t know how to say it, so he’d chosen silence instead.
None of them sat right. None of them were impossible.
I’d spent the last two weeks of the mission throwing up every morning, sleeping in chairs and on comm boards at odd hours, losing weight I couldn’t afford to lose. Sterling had noticed—of course he had—and had done what Sterling did, which was to stand directly in my path until I acknowledged that something was wrong.
The sympathy nausea, the doctors called it. A physical response to a partner’s condition, rare, but documented. Not something that happened to men who weren’t involved, who weren’t committed, who weren’t exactly where they were supposed to be.
Not something I was ready to name, even to myself.
