Page 34 of Broken Cedar

“Yeah, then it landed on the blanket and you had to stamp the flames out.”

He chuckles, and the sound settles warmly between us. He shakes the blanket and spreads it on the ground a few feet back from the edge. He sits and pats the space beside him. Doesn’t look at me while he does it, just looks at the view instead.

I walk over and sit. Our shoulders are close but not touching. For a while neither of us says anything. There doesn’t seem to be any need. The ranch stretches beneath us in every direction, stitched together by fences that catch the sunlight in silver lines. I find myself tracing familiar landmarks. The calving pasture. The old windmill. Except…

I frown. “Wasn’t the windmill farther east?”

His gaze follows mine. “It was.”

“What happened?” I glance over at him, but his attention is focused on the view.

“Storm took it.”

“When?”

“About five years ago.” He points toward another rise. “Built the new one over there.”

I follow his hand. I’d never have noticed it on my own. “There are more trees,” I say.

“Yeah. Figured whoever was checking fences in twenty years might appreciate some shade.”

The words catch me unexpectedly. Twenty years. He’d been planning for a future while I’d been convincing myself I wasn’t looking back.

I swallow. “I used to think,” I say softly, “that by thirty I’d have it figured out. Whatever ‘it’ is. Career, relationship, the whole package. The thing they sell you in magazines.”

Colt glances toward me. “And?”

“I have a career. An apartment. Friends who remember my birthday. By most metrics, I’m doing fine.” I pick at a thread on the blanket. “But sitting here, looking at this place…it doesn’t feel like I thought it would feel. Getting what you want. It feels…”

“Complicated,” Colt says.

“Yeah. Complicated.”

He nods and looks at his hands. His fingers are rough, calloused in places. “I never wanted this,” he says.

He doesn’t elaborate, but I know what he means. The ranch. The running it. Keeping it going. The words drift away on the wind. Neither of us rushes to fill the silence.

Colt absently pulls at a blade of grass between his fingers. He doesn’t sound bitter. If anything, he sounds surprised, as though admitting it aloud after all these years feels stranger than living it.

I think about everything spread out beneath us. The repaired fences. The new sheds. The windmill. The trees he’d planted for someone who might need shade decades from now.

He has spent eight years quietly building a life he never planned to have. And not once—not once since I’d been home—had I heard him complain about it.

Mom offered to run it after Jim passed. Said she would hire more hands to help out and that it would all be fine, that she would manage. But Colt wouldn’t hear of it.

“Are you happy?” I ask softly.

He considers the question. “Most days,” he says. “Some days it’s just work. Some days it’s…yeah. Most days I’m happy.”

I study him for a moment. “You ever still think about it?”

He glances over. “What?”

“Becoming a marshal.”

The question hangs between us. He looks back out across the valley before answering.

“No.” It’s such a simple answer that for a second I wonder if he’s misunderstood me.