Page 1 of Broken Cedar

Chapter One

The mountains haven’t changed. That’s the first thing that hits me, rolling west on Highway 93 with the windows down and my hair doing its best impression of a tumbleweed.

“You can do this,” I say to the empty passenger seat. “Just the memorial. Just a few days. It won’t be that bad.”

The words taste rehearsed. I’ve been saying them since I booked the flight, cleared my calendar at work, and told my landlord I’d be out of town for a long weekend. I could have tried to get out of coming, but I’d be a pretty shitty daughter if I didn’t come home for the tenth anniversary of my stepfather’s death.

My phone buzzes in the cup holder with a text from my assistant: Client moved the presentation to Tuesday. You good?

No. But I have become extremely good at looking like I am.

The turnoff for Broken Cedar Ranch appears on the right, and my foot lifts off the gas without my permission. The sign is worse for wear—wood cracked along the grain, the paint barely legible. We carved our initials into the back of it once, Colt and I, with the pocketknife he wasn’t supposed to have. Not in, like, a romantic way. Just proof that I was here, he was here. That we existed in the same square foot of dust.

The road narrows. The mountains crowd closer. The sky, already enormous, opens even wider. In the city, it’s something you glimpse between buildings. Here, it demands to be seen. The mountains, the fields, the ache rising in my throat—they all share the same stubborn quality. They exist whether I acknowledge them or not.

The ranch appears all at once. Red barn, vivid as a wound against the pale green of spring grass. Paddocks dotted with horses, their coats catching the light. The oak tree at the edge of the drive, its trunk still too wide to wrap your arms around.

I ease the car into the courtyard, gravel crunching beneath the tires with a sound my body remembers before my mind does.

The front door of the house flies open before I’ve even cut the engine. My mother stands on the porch, one hand shading her eyes, the other pressed flat against the doorframe like she’s holding herself up. She’s wearing the same faded jeans and work shirt she’s worn for decades, her hair pulled back in a ponytail that’s more silver than brown now. I have approximately three seconds to prepare myself.

It’s not enough.

She’s down the steps and across the yard before I can unbuckle my seat belt, and then her arms are around me and I’m twelve years old again, coming home from school with a skinned knee, except I’m thirty and my knee is fine and the thing that’s hurting can’t be fixed with a Band-Aid.

“Oh, honey,” she says into my hair. “You’re here. You’re really here.”

I am. Against all better judgment, against eight years of carefully constructed distance, I am here. Her shirt smells like laundry soap and coffee and something underneath that I can’t name but my body recognizes anyway. Home. It smells like home, and the word lands in my chest like a stone.

“I’m here,” I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.

She pulls back, holding me at arm’s length, and I watch her eyes do the thing they always do—the inventory. Top to bottom, taking stock.

“Look at you,” she says. “You’re skin and bones.”

“Hey,” I say. “I eat a lot.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you’re home. I made the casserole. The one with the tater tots.”

“The funeral casserole,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t. Her face doesn’t change, but something in her eyes tightens, and the guilt arrives right on schedule, hot and familiar.

“Memorial casserole,” she corrects gently. “And yes. Among others.” She tucks a strand of dark blonde hair behind my ear and studies my face. “Did you sleep on the flight?”

“Some.”

“Some isn’t yes.”

“Some is better than none.”

She sighs, but there’s no real frustration in it. “Come inside. Your room’s made up. I aired it out this morning.”

We walk toward the house together, her arm looped through mine, and I let her lead me. Inside, the house smells exactly the same—wood polish, something baking, and the faint, dusty sweetness of dried flowers. The same photographs line the hallway. The same braided rug lies in the entryway, worn thin in the places where generations of Walker feet have paused to kick off boots.

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

I set my suitcase down in the hallway and stand there for a second, listening to the quiet. In my apartment, the quiet is different—the product of good insulation and neighbors who work nine-to-five. This quiet is thick. It has layers. It has the weight of things that have been happening here, day after day, whether I was around to witness them or not.

“Colt’s out at the barn,” Mom says, and the name hits me like a door swinging open into a dark room. My heart does something complicated and embarrassing in my chest. Hammering. That’s the word. It’s hammering, which is not a thing I thought hearts actually did outside of paperback novels, but here we are.