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We head back out through the dining hall and into the living room behind the stairs. “Big, comfy couches, a nice-sized television I hope is only used at night or when it’s raining, and look—” I motion to a shelf stacked with our family’s entire collection of old board games, some of which were passed down from my grandparents.

He walks over, pulls out an old game of Trouble, and a memory shifts into my mind. All of us gathered around the table after we’d cleared the plates and done the dishes. Game Night. Noble had been coming around a few months by then, but when he saw our board game collection, he looked confused. Turned out, he’d never played a single board game. Said his mom wasn’t really into them.

“Can’t believe you kept all of these,” he says.

“Momma did,” I say. “For once her hoarding worked in my favor. She never throws anything away. Not anything nostalgic anyway. Last month, I found an old Walkman she had when she was a teenager.”

“It’s probably worth a fortune.”

I open a glass door that leads outside onto a patio that wraps around the side and back of the lodge. “Look out here.” We walk around to the back patio, and I stop. “Check out that view.”

He draws in a slow, deep breath. “Can I tell you something?”

My breath catches, but I tell myself to quit it. Because the odds he’s going to say I’ve always loved you, Hattie are next to nothing.

“I dream about this place,” he says. “All the time. Not sure if you realize what you’ve got here.”

“Are you kidding?” I say. “I’m not the one who left, remember?” The words bite. I’m struggling, trying to feel one way but actually feeling another.

It hurts, the memory of him leaving.

I stare out at the lake, my eye catching on the kayaks stacked near the shore.

He looks at me. “Maybe that’s why you light up when you talk about it. Reminds me of the old Hattie.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

He shrugs and goes back to staring at the lake. “When we were kids, you know? Before . . .” He trails off, and I know exactly what he was going to say.

My eyes instantly get cloudy.

“Before Hunter,” I say softly.

A pause.

“Yeah,” Noble says. “I dream about him sometimes too.”

Everything changed after he died. For all of us.

The weight of it isn’t as heavy after all these years, but it’s always there. There’s always an unspoken question—What would he be like if he was still here?

Noble clears his throat and stretches. “I’m just glad to see that little spitfire is still in there, underneath all of those big brains,” he says. “This place? This dream? Looks like you got your spark back. I know it got pretty dark for a while.”

“Yep. It did.” I clench my jaw tight. “And then you left.”

The memory is so fresh it hits me like it happened yesterday.

“Hattie—”

“It’s fine,” I say, brushing it off. I know I’m being overly sensitive, but I don’t want the reminder any more than I want Noble to think of me as a “little spitfire.”

Once upon a time, I had big rodeo dreams of my own. I had a whole plan—competitions and brand deals and trophies and national titles. Everything, coincidentally, that Noble has now.

But when my brother Hunter was killed by a drunk driver, all those plans seemed stupid and frivolous. I grew up fast and gave up dreaming. I was innately aware of how fleeting life could be—even at eighteen.

I got scared of just about everything. I didn’t know what I’d do next, but I knew I’d be sticking close to home. This town and this ranch became my safe haven.

I stopped doing anything even a tiny bit risky. I didn’t get behind the wheel for a long time, didn’t even ride my horse for years, and I’d been doing that since I was practically a toddler.