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“To the souvenir shop. Move there.”
“Okay, Gram.” She wanted to argue. How was she supposed to live in a shop?
“Live above it,” Gram said weakly. “Where you stayed with me in the summer.”
Dakota vaguely remembered the shop from visiting during the summer when she was a kid. She’d kind of forgotten that there was an apartment above the shop where her gram lived. She could hardly believe it, since she’d stayed there herself. But she hadn’t realized that the apartment was part of the shop. She supposed in her head she had thought that her gram had rented the apartment. Or something.
She hadn’t paid much attention to what was going on at the shop, because Strawberry Sands had a riding stable, and she had been as wild and free as she could be on the beach with the horses.
But that thought brought her pain too. Because it reminded her of Ryan Landry.
Ryan, whom she’d asked to marry her and who had turned her down. That was why she had ended up with Gregory, her ex.
But she wasn’t going there either. She pushed the bad thoughts aside. She couldn’t focus on the things that didn’t work out. She had to focus on the things that she could control.
Which felt like very little. Except, she still had Goldie. For now.
She could put Goldie up on social media for sale, and she would sell within the hour. Dakota was confident of that. But Goldie had been the one constant that she’d had since her college days. Goldie had been with her as she became a championship contender, had been her best friend, had been the one that she told everything to, as her world came tumbling down, not twice but three times.
First, when her parents had been killed in a freak rodeo accident, and second when she felt like her only choice was to get married, and then again when her marriage imploded.
“I love you,” her gram said weakly.
“Gram, I love you too. I wish you weren’t leaving me.” Boy, how she ever wished her gram wasn’t leaving. It felt like everything in her life that she tried to hold onto had been ripped from her.
Everything except her children and Goldie.
“If I didn’t leave, you couldn’t move on to what’s next. Don’t be afraid. You know God has everything under control. Just follow His plan.”
It was the most Gram had said to her in over a week, but she wanted to snort. It felt like God’s plan for her whole life had been to kick her, then kick her harder. And anytime she tried to get up, He’d kick her again.
That felt like a really great sum of God’s plan.
But somehow through all that, she never forgot He loved her. She never doubted it. Even though at times it felt like she should. Like the wise thing to do would be to just throw in the towel and admit that if there was a God, she didn’t really want to know Him.
Except for the thought that all the bad things that she had gone through had made her stronger and better, had helped her become the person God wanted her to be, so that she could do what God wanted her to do, and she just couldn’t let go of Him.
Maybe He really did have a plan for her.
She wanted to believe that. Sometimes, the things that a person really wanted to believe were the hardest things of all.
But she could hardly move forward with God’s plan when she had no money, no place to live, and nothing to fall back on, with her gram leaving her.
Except for Goldie. She had Goldie.
The thought made her almost physically sick, but if she was going to move to Michigan, the only way that was going to happen was if she sold her horse.
As a grand champion barrel racing contender, Goldie was well known on the rodeo circuit, and even though she was past her prime and would not be winning any championships, she would be prized as a broodmare. Which is what Dakota had planned for her, if she’d ever been able to have a place where Goldie could stay.
Currently, she was boarding Goldie and was two months behind on her payments to the stable owner.
The stable owner knew her gram was dying, and had given her grace, but Dakota couldn’t promise to pay, because she had no idea how she was even going to feed her children, let alone board her horse.
She had to face the fact that as a responsible mother, it was more important that her children eat than that she keep her horse.
With that thought in her head, and with her gram’s hand going limp, Dakota put her forehead back down on her gram’s bed, still on her knees, and prayed again, “Lord, I don’t want to let her go.”
But a peace came to her, and while it wasn’t an audible voice, she understood that what she had just thought—selling her horse and moving to Michigan—was the right thing to do.
