Page 35 of Broken Cedar

“You don’t?”

He shakes his head once. “Not anymore.”

The words settle over us with surprising gentleness. For years I’d imagined him measuring every spring branding, every broken fence, every early morning against the life he’d almost had. I’d imagined him looking at a sheriff’s cruiser rolling through town and wondering. Instead, he sounds like someone who made peace with a different future long ago. Somehow that makes me the one still living in the past.

“Mmm,” is all I can think to say in response.

“What about you?” he asks. “The city. Is it what you thought?”

I look out across the valley instead of at him. It’s strange. For years I’d imagined this place exactly as it is now. The ridge. The creek. The barn roof glinting in the afternoon sun. I’d thought I was homesick for Montana.

But being here now, I wonder if I’d been homesick for something far more specific. Not the mountains. Not the ranch. Him. The thought arrives so quietly I almost miss it. And once it’s there, I can’t make it leave.

“It’s good,” I say eventually, when I realize he’s still waiting on my answer. And it is. It is good. That’s the problem. “It’s just…”

“Not this,” he says softly.

“Not this,” I agree. We’re both silent. “I used to come up here.” The words come out quieter than I intended. “After I left. Not physically, obviously. In my head, I mean. I’d close my eyes and I’d be here, looking at this view, and it was…it was the thing I missed most.”

Colt is quiet for a long time. So long I think maybe he hasn’t heard me, or maybe he has and doesn’t know what to say. Then he says, “I know.”

He is looking at the view, not at me, but I can see the tension in his jaw, the particular set of his shoulders that means he’s holding something back. He’s not ready to talk about that night. Not yet. I pick at the blanket. The wool is soft under my fingers, worn to the point where the individual threads have begun to fray.

“I wasn’t exactly thrilled when you left,” he says softly.

The words land between us like something delicate. I laugh. The sound comes out nervous, brittle, the kind of laugh that’s more defense mechanism than actual amusement. “You hid it well.”

“Didn’t have much choice.” The second admission is quieter than the first. Almost inaudible over the wind.

“You could have said something,” I say. It’s not really an accusation, just the truth.

“Could I have?”

Yes, I want to say. Of course you could have. You could have called. Written. Told me not to go.

“I thought,” I say carefully, “that you were relieved. When I left. I thought—God, this sounds so stupid now—I thought maybe it would be easier for you if I left.”

Colt turns and looks at me. “Is that really what you thought?”

I swallow. “It’s what I told myself.”

“Why?”

“Because the alternative was harder.”

The alternative was that he wanted me to stay. To run his father’s ranch with him and live a small life. The kind of life that I never wanted. The alternative was that we’ve both been carrying the same wound for eight years and calling it by different names.

“I built a life,” I say weakly. “In the city. A good life. I have friends. A career. An apartment with plants that I keep alive, most of the time. I’m…I’m happy there.”

Most of the time.

“But?” he prompts.

“But coming back here…” I gesture at the view, at the ranch, at everything below us that hasn’t changed and everything between us that has. “It makes the city feel…small. Not physically. Just…the life I built there. It sometimes feels like I constructed it to prove something. To myself. To you.” I absently pull at a blade of grass. “I missed so much.” The words leave my mouth before I’ve decided to say them. Colt looks at me.

“I don’t just mean you.” I gesture toward the valley. “I missed storms. Calving season. Harvests. New fences…” My throat tightens. “I kept thinking I’d come back next summer.” I laugh softly. “Then it became the summer after that. And then suddenly…eight years.”

Colt doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t tell me it wasn’t that long, because it was. Eight years measured not by calendars, but by all the ordinary days I wasn’t here to see.