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Lucy took the long way back to the Rocky M. She opened up Reese’s car going over the pass, and the engine roared and the world slipped by like a ribbon. The wind blasting through her open window wasn’t enough to cool her fevered skin, her damaged pride, so she hit the controls to unroll every window until it was a cyclone inside the car. Her hair whipped around her head and still her skin burned, her heart ached.
Stupidly, she felt like crying.
Don’t care, she told herself, slowing down to take the first curve down the mountain toward the ranch. You’ve got enough shit to worry about without worrying about Jeremiah Stone.
The smart move would be to leave. To pack up her mother and face up to the mess in Los Angeles.
But the thought made her panic, and cold sweat formed around her hairline. She wasn’t ready. It had only been three weeks since she’d let her employees go and closed up the shop.
Couldn’t she have some time to grieve? To lick her wounds?
Hide?
Such a coward.
The Rocky M ranch slipped in and out of view through the pine trees until she turned left up the long driveway. The brown ranch house sat under a granite overhang. As a kid she’d prayed more than once that the mountain would fall down on that house.
That Mia could call this place home baffled her.
That this was where Lucy had chosen to lick her wounds was even more strange. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. Broke didn’t even begin to describe her financial state.
She parked beside her sister’s battered pickup truck, raised the windows and turned off the engine. The quiet echoed and boomed like a heartbeat. Like the house was alive and waiting for her.
Exhausted by the roller coaster of the night, she finally pulled herself out of the car and into the house through the side door.
It was midnight and the house was silent.
Mia and Jack were a mile up the road, using the house Mia and Lucy had grown up in—the little two-story that Sandra had cared for so passionately—until the new house up in the high pastures was finished.
Walter, Jack’s father, was still living in the ranch house. And for the last three weeks, Lucy and Sandra had been staying in the guest rooms in the back of the house that smelled like mothballs and had beds like hammocks.
She unzipped her boots in the mudroom, stepped back, and looked at her gray high-heeled Prada knockoffs next to the filthy work boots. It was the perfect symbol of how she didn’t belong here. Had never belonged here.
Just a little bit longer, she thought. Just until I formulate a plan. Get my feet under me.
Through the dark she walked right to her mother’s bedroom and knocked softly on the door.
“Mom?” she called, and she heard the bed creak.
“Come in, Lucy,” her mother said, and Lucy walked into the small bedroom with the window that looked down over the backyard. Mom pushed herself up in bed, her still-black hair a cloud around her shoulders. The white of her nightgown glowed in the dark. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”
Knowing she needed no special permission, she crawled into her mother’s bed, the warmth under the covers immediately banishing the chill of the evening.
She curled up on her side and stared at her mother’s perennially youthful face. They needed to find her a life. A man to take her dancing. A church group that would keep her young.
“Fine,” Lucy whispered, and Sandra turned on her side, her hands under her chin, mirroring Lucy’s position.
“It’s time for us to go home,” Sandra said.
“What? Why?”
“I thought it would be easier coming here,” she said. “But it’s difficult—”
“Because of Walter?” Lucy practically spat the man’s name.
“Not just Walter, although he doesn’t help. This place is haunted.”
“But Mia’s here—”
“And married. Settled.” Sandra blew out a long breath, looking at her hands. “There’s nothing for me to do here. No way for me to be useful.”
Oh, her mother’s need to be needed. Lucy couldn’t understand it.
“But Mom…” Lucy grasped at straws, finally settling on the truth she hadn’t wanted to face in the five years they’d lived in Los Angeles. “You don’t like the city.”
“That’s not true.”
She gave her mother a wry look.
“Well, I don’t like it here so much, either.” Sandra sat up. “There’s nothing for me to do here. I’m useless.”
“You’re cooking—”
“Cooking!” she cried and then shook her head, as if biting her tongue.
Lucy wrapped her fingers over her mother’s fist. Dad had died five years ago and, in the grand scheme of things, that wasn’t very long. Mom was still grieving.
Yeah, she thought and you’re the ungrateful daughter keeping her someplace she doesn’t want to be.
“What about your jewelry?” Sandra asked. “You’ve been gone three weeks. Aren’t you needed back at your studio?”
