She nods, pulling the sheet up, her hair spread across the pillow, cheeks still flushed. I let myself look at her for one more second.
Then I answer.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Son. Got a Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood at the gate. Peter and Celia Sherwood too. Say they want to talk to you and Lila.”
The moment Lila hears her family’s name through the speaker, the color drains from her face.
“I’ll send them away,” I say immediately.
“No.” Her voice is quiet but certain. She sits up, sheet pooling at her waist. “Whatever they’re here for, better to face it head on.”
I hold her gaze for a beat. Then I put the phone back to my ear.
“Send them up, Dad.”
I hang up.
Neither of us moves for a moment. The candle flickers on the nightstand. Outside the wind is picking up off the mountains, moving through the frost-silvered grass, the clouds low and iron-grey.
We get dressed without talking. I watch her pull on herjeans and reach for a sweater and twist her hair back, and I think about what her family is going to see when they pull up: this woman who left their world and built her own. Something settles in my chest.
She’s not going back to whatever she came from. Not today. Not ever.
When she’s dressed I cross to her and pull her in before she can reach for the door, hugging her tightly.
“You’re not facing them alone,” I tell her. My lips against the top of her head. “You’ll never have to face them alone again.”
She pulls back just enough to look up at me. The question is right there in her eyes: Denver, the plan, the version of the future that still has me leaving.
I have plans for that.
Plans I need to tell her about, but now, with her family bearing down on our doorstep, is not that time.
But soon.
“I promise you, baby,” I tell her. “I’ll take care of you.”
She presses up onto her toes and kisses me soft and quick, her hands fisted in my shirt.
Then she steps back, straightens her spine, and lifts her chin.
I take her hand.
We walk out to the porch and stand in the cold morning air, hand in hand, watching the dust rise on the drive as the car comes toward the house.
The gleaming black SUV pulls to a stop. Then four immaculately dressed Sherwoods get out of the car with disapproving looks. All of them look like they’re on their way to or from a yacht club.
I take the baseball cap off my head and put it backwards on Lila’s head. We exchange a small, warmsmile.
She’s in her muddy rain boots and my flannel, hair loose in the wind beneath the hat, the enormous diamond on her left hand catching what little light is coming through the clouds and throwing it back.
Those eyes of hers aren’t soft and doe-like the way they get when she looks at something she loves, but fierce and battle-ready, the way she gets when she looks at something she wants to change.
She looks exactly like what she is. A rebel. An independent spirit. A true-blue—or pink, as it were—Montana cowgirl.
That’s my fucking wife, right there.
