Page 57 of Broken Cedar

We’re both silent for a long while. Eventually his breathing slows as his body relaxes against mine. His arm stays around my waist. His breath is warm against the back of my neck.

I stay awake, counting his breaths. In. Out. In. Out. Thinking about tomorrow, about how I don’t want to go. I don’t want the airport or the apartment or the life I’d spent eight years building. For the first time, the city feels less like home than the place I’d spent so long trying to escape.

But wanting isn’t the same as choosing. I’ve spent eight years building a life around independence, and I still cannot see how the woman I’ve become fits alongside the life waiting here.

So I lie there. Colt’s breath against my neck. His heartbeat against my spine. The lamp still burning because neither of us has remembered to turn it off. And I let myself, for one impossible moment, want exactly what I have—his weight, his warmth, this man who has loved me all these years without ever asking whether I was capable of loving him back.

I wait until his breathing is deep, steady. Then I move. His arm is heavy across my waist. I lift it, just enough to slide out from under its weight. Colt shifts and mumbles something unintelligible into his pillow but doesn’t wake.

I stand beside the bed and look at him. In the lamplight, his face is softer. Younger, almost. The lines around his eyes relaxed in sleep. One arm stretched across the space where I’d been lying, as though his body was already reaching for something that wasn’t there.

I find my clothes on the floor and pull them on, then sneak out of his room. I pad down the hall back to my own room, closing the door softly behind me. I lean against it, breathing for a minute.

Tomorrow is coming. It isn’t theoretical anymore. I have a life waiting in a city that suddenly feels impossibly far away. And for the first time, I can’t convince myself those two lives are impossible to imagine together.

Chapter Sixteen

The room is still dark when I open my eyes. For a moment I don’t know what woke me. Then I realize I never really fell asleep. I check the time on my phone. 4:47.

Too early.

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. The house is silent. Somewhere outside, a horse nickers softly. Pipes creak as the house settles around me. The familiar sounds should be comforting. Instead they make something inside my chest ache.

I close my eyes again but sleep doesn’t come. After another few minutes I throw the blankets back in a huff and sit on the edge of the bed. The floorboards are cool beneath my feet as I pull on yesterday’s jeans, tug a shirt over my head, and quietly open the bedroom door.

The hallway is empty. Mom’s door is closed. Colt’s is too. I pause outside it longer than I should before forcing myself toward the stairs.

The screen door complains softly as I step onto the porch. Morning hasn’t arrived yet. The sky is that strange shade between night and dawn where everything is blue instead of black.

I wrap my arms around myself and look out across the pasture. Everything looks exactly the same. Everything except me. I should go back inside. Instead I stay where I am. Because if I go back inside, everything starts moving. The drive to the airport. My apartment. Work on Monday. My life. The words don’t feel as certain as they did a week ago.

I rest my hands on the porch railing.

I could stay.

The thought arrives so quietly I almost miss it.

Nobody is making me get on that plane. I could walk back inside, tell Mom I’d canceled my flight, and she’d probably just nod like she’d expected it all along. I could find Colt still in bed and tell him I wasn’t leaving.

The image appears so clearly I can almost believe I’ve already done it. His expression. His laugh. The way he’d look at me like I’d just handed him something he’d stopped hoping for years ago. My throat tightens. I could. That is the problem. For the first time in eight years, leaving isn’t something that’s happening to me. It’s something I’m choosing.

I look out across the ranch again. The barn. The corrals. The fields stretching toward the ridge. This place has never asked me to become anyone except myself.

The city asked me to become ambitious. Independent. Successful. I managed all three. I built a life I’m proud of. A career I worked for. Friends I chose. An apartment that finally felt like home.

Going back isn’t surrender. It’s keeping the promises I made to the twenty-two-year-old version of myself who drove away from this ranch convinced that leaving was the bravest thing she’d ever do.

If I stay…what if I’m wrong? What if I’ve spent eight years becoming someone who doesn’t fit here anymore? What if Colt and I discover that one week isn’t enough to build a forever? What if I give up everything I’ve built…and it still isn’t enough?

The questions pile on top of each other until they become almost impossible to breathe beneath. I let out a slow breath. The city is familiar. Predictable. I know who I am there. Here…here I have no idea who I’m becoming.

I close my eyes. When I open them again, nothing has changed. The sun is just beginning to edge over the eastern hills. The ranch is waiting for another ordinary day. It doesn’t know I’m about to leave it again.

I push away from the railing. My legs feel strangely heavy as I cross the porch. The screen door creaks open as I head inside and walk upstairs. I pull my suitcase from beneath the bed, and slowly begin to pack.

Half an hour later, my suitcase sits open on the bed, almost full. The room already looks exactly the way it looked when I arrived—bed made, curtains drawn, everything in its place—except for the suitcase on the bed. The suitcase contains all the evidence that I was ever here. Soon it won’t.

I pull the T-shirt from the pillow. The one I borrowed from Colt three days ago because I ran out of clean clothes and he handed it to me without comment. It smells like him. I hold it to my face and breathe in his scent. Then I carefully fold it, and place it in the suitcase.