I pressed my lips to the top of her tiny head.
Nobody was watching.
When I finally stood and set her down, I looked around the quiet kitchen. No work today. No Brody. No Sassy texting to make plans. Just me and the pesky thing I'd been putting off for two months now.
I grabbed my keys.
Forty minutes south on Route 89, just outside Livingston. I'd looked it up so many times, the address had lodged itself somewhere behind my eyes whether I wanted it there or not. Pulled it up again anyway at the first stop sign, like maybe it had changed.
It hadn't.
The mountains in my rearview gave way to the Absarokas range as I drove, the landscape shifting and opening up in that particular Montana way that made you feel very small and not entirely bad about it. I'd been trying not to notice things like that for two months. Mostly failing.
The radio played something I didn't register. I turned it off.
The last few miles I drove in silence, watching the flat sprawl of Livingston come into view. A twinge tightened in my chest the closer I got.
I'd told myself I was waiting for the right moment. Then I'd told myself I was too busy. Then I'd told myself he probably didn't remember me anyway.
I pulled up to the assisted living facility just after noon.
By one, I'd managed to park and turn the truck off, but I hadn't moved an inch.
The facility was nicer than I'd expected. Low building. Well-kept flower beds along the front walk that somebody clearly tended with care. A few residents in the garden off to the side, one in a wide-brimmed hat moving slow between the raised beds. Normal. Peaceful, even.
I stared at the front entrance and felt absolutely nothing that resembled the ability to walk through it.
The thing was, I didn't know what I was walking into. Didn't know if he'd know my name or my face or anything about me at all. Didn't know if he'd be sharp or gone or somewhere in between. Didn't know if he'd want to see me, or if showing up after all this time—after his daughter died and his granddaughter disappeared into two decades of nowhere—would read as cruelty dressed up as a visit.
Didn't know if I was here for him or for me or for my mama or for some version of myself that was twelve years old and standing in the center of that paddock watching her whole world come apart.
The man in the front office wouldn't know any of that. He'd just see a woman who'd filled out a visitor form online and shown up on a Saturday in July.
I could do that.
I could just bethat.
I put my hand on the car door handle.
Took it off again.
A family came out through the front entrance—mom, dad, two kids, grandma moving slow between them with a walker, everyone laughing at something. The little girl ran ahead and held the door and the grandma said something that made the whole group laugh again. They loaded into a minivan and were gone in under two minutes.
I watched the whole thing from behind my windshield like it was a nature documentary.
My phone was in my hand before I'd made a conscious decision about it.
It rang twice.
"Hey—"
"I'm in a parking lot in Livingston and I can't get out of my truck." I said it fast, before I could talk myself out of saying it at all. "I came to see my granddad and I've been sitting here for an hour and I can't—" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. "I don't know why I called you."
A beat of silence.
"What's the address?"
"Brody, you don't have to?—"
