Read Runaway for the Grumpy Daddy Online Free by Lucky Moon

I drove fifty.

Then forty-five.

Then thirty-five.

The storm did not care what I had promised or broken. It did not care that Boone sat in a county cell because I told the truth. It did not care that Derek slept ten feet from an empty couch, confident he had put the world back where he preferred it. Weather came down on the guilty and innocent with perfect fairness, which was another way of saying no fairness at all.

My headlights found the next hundred feet.

That was enough.

For six months, I had understood my escape from Derek as a straight line.

Apartment. Butte motel. Silver Bend. Carrow Creek.

Away.

I thought distance was the work. Put enough miles between his front door and my bed, keep the truck fueled, check every mirror, never depend on anybody for rent, and eventually I would become a woman he had not made.

But the old belief had ridden with me.

Quiet. Patient. Buckled into the passenger seat.

I am the problem.

It had been there when the Courier printed my face and Derek found the ranch. There when he walked into the Bluebird and turned thirty strangers' eyes careful. There when Hutchins clicked steel around Boone's wrists. There when Cash held Biscuit back and I stood in the barn with truth still warm in my mouth and watched the man I loved get taken away.

I had told myself I went to Bozeman because it was the fastest way to make Derek stop.

That was true.

He had created the charge. He could withdraw it. A clean trade. One body for another. Mine for Boone's.

But underneath that truth was the old one.

Remove yourself and everyone else gets better.

The ranch sale would be safer without me. Boone's record would be safer without me. Wyatt would have one less variable. Cash could go back to smiling. Silver Bend could stop choosing which story to believe. A storm was coming, and I had looked at everything I loved and concluded the best thing I could contribute was my absence.