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“You want to come into town with me?”

“Sure. Where are you going?”

“I got some stuff I want to get out of storage,” he says.

I go still, thinking hard. “Bill, I—”

He lifts his head, pushing back his hat a little. “The thing about running from something is that it’s gonna catch up to you at some point.”

“I’m not running.”

He gives me a look, lifting his arm and pointing to the right. “That way is Nashville. How’d you feel about going that way?”

I stare over the east field. My stomach tightens, but there’s also a ripple of excitement at the idea of getting back to work. It’s been pleasant to be back here in Wyoming, but I’m not connecting with it the way I hoped. Maybe I need to get in the truck and go find the house where I grew up, see if there’s anything left. That might fit a piece of my disjointed puzzle into place.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Do you want to?”

“Go back? No, I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re running.”

I don’t like that thought. He sighs, heaving himself off the steps. “C’mon, go with me to the storage unit. You don’t have to take nothing back with you.”

I dip my head, but not because he’s got me convinced. No, it’s because Sabrina steps out onto the porch, and two thoughts occur to me in rapid succession. Bill wants me to go to the storage unit with him, and I appreciate him wanting to be friendly and include me. I’m feeling guilty because, secondly, I fucked his daughter, and I don’t think he’d take all that kindly to that. I don’t regret it, though.

Hell, against my better judgement, I’d do it again.

My eyes drift over Bill and fall on Sabrina.

God, she’s beautiful, in the same kind of frayed jean shorts and cropped shirt as she was when we met. This time, her shirt’s cut a little higher, and the faint line of her belly is visible.

I swallow hard. I kind of feel like I’m fucking Bill over, and, by proxy, Jamie, by feeling this fired up just looking at Sabrina. I wonder what Jamie would say if he knew. He’d probably be shocked I went so far as to sleep with Sabrina when I’m usually pretty risk averse these days. And we had a conversation about this, one I dropped the second I saw her big blue eyes.

I blink, reaching for my sunglasses. “Let’s go. I can drive.”

It takes a while to get Bill rounded up and in the passenger side of the truck. Then, I have to stop halfway down the drive so Sabrina can run his thermos of coffee down to him. He thanks her, squeezing her hand, and she smiles back, the freckles across her nose wrinkling.

“You two have fun!”

We get on the road, and there’s a comfortable silence as Bill sighs and sinks back.

“They’re great,” he says.

“You’re very lucky,” I say carefully.

He thinks, gazing at the fields streaming by. “How’s Jamie doing out in the big city?”

I think back to the last time I saw Jamie, the day before getting on the plane. We met up at our favorite diner in Nashville, had some coffee. He had his usual, a coffee and a pile of bacon and eggs. He gets that no matter the time of day. I got my favorite, a cinnamon-sugar donut and a cut of plain black coffee. There’s something about the bitter with the sweet that’s comforting, reminding me of when we were struggling together, at the beginning.

Jamie looked good, driven, relaxed, but he was concerned for me.

***

“You sure you’re good?”

I glance up. My smartwatch keeps going off, and I keep ignoring it. I’ve had to keep all my notifications on for email and texts. We’re fresh off producing one of the biggest albums of the year for an unnamed star who won’t leave me the fuck alone. Texting me at all hours of the day and night. Unhappy with everything we sent over, then happy with it, then wanting to pull back and restart at the last minute. It almost sent me into a breakdown.