The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(67)

“I only had my learner’s permit then, but I knew how to drive. We drove all over the ranch. It was a long drive from the takeoff point to home. So I went home. And by that night... Everything had changed. It would’ve been me, Mallory. It’s not a could have been, might’ve been. It would have been. If not for that last-minute exchange... I’d be dead.”

“Colt, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say except that’s just one of those things. One of those things that most of us never get a chance to know about. I’m sure we’ve all had near misses and never had to confront them. I... I assist with birth. I see the thin line between life and death so often in those moments. The baby’s cord can be in the wrong place. Something can take too long. Distress can occur. A moment that seems normal can turn into something altering in a terrible way. It’s just that line... It’s so thin.”

She knew it deep. Far too well. She lived, Lucy didn’t. The world still turned.

“How are you supposed to live knowing that?”

She didn’t speak for a long time, because there was no pat answer for it. They were clearly both living. But he wasn’t living whole, and that was clear enough. She could see it. She knew it. And she didn’t know how to fix it. Didn’t know how to fix him. Obviously, if it were that simple it would be done. He would’ve fixed himself.

“The way we’ve been doing it, I guess,” she said. “One breath at a time. A moment at a time.”

“I’m tired,” he said.

And her heart broke into a thousand pieces. “I know. I can feel it.” She reached across the space in the car and put her hand on his. “Maybe you don’t need to have all the answers.”

“I’ve never had them. And I kept thinking that someday I would. Someday I would see it. A purpose, a point, to all of this. But all I have is more unanswered questions. All I got was another loss that I can’t explain.”

“You’re not at fault for what happened. Not to either of them. You aren’t responsible for bad weather that takes down a plane. Or for the decisions the pilot made. Or just... Mechanical errors. You’re not responsible for the drinking that a young man did. You’re not responsible for the fact that he chose to ride. And you know... You did enough stupid things to know that sometimes you walk away from those things.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But he didn’t. And that’s hard for me to accept. I’ve had infinite chances to be a dumbass. To pretend like I didn’t give a shit about my own mortality because if it came for me, it came. Do you know what that’s like? To feel like fate must’ve spared you. It doesn’t feel like glory. I think some people might take it that way. But I never did. I just thought... What a terrible weight. What a horrendous burden. Because I never felt like I was very special. And I couldn’t help my family any. It would’ve been better if they’d been left with my mother. Not with me. What was I going to do to help anyone? Ryder had to take it all on his shoulders because there were no adults left. One fifteen-year-old kid that couldn’t help anybody...”

“Maybe you don’t need to fix anything.”

He didn’t say anything to that. And she just wished that she could... She wished that she had the right words. But if the right, easy words existed... That all of this would be simple. And she knew that it wasn’t. She carried around a whole host of blame for a relationship that she’d been in with a crappy guy. And yeah, a lot of it was down to her decisions. But it was taking time to sort through that, and it wasn’t anywhere near the kind of trauma that he’d experienced in his life. It wasn’t even comparable.

“I feel like I should. My mom was a good woman, Mallory. Maybe the best. She... She used to call me brave when I would sing my songs.”

Those words were like a knife twisted directly in her sternum. She could feel his pain, and also his reluctance to continue. No, not reluctance, his inability to continue. Because it was too much, this. Too painful. She could feel it in the weight of every word, in the raw scrape of them against his throat. It was clear. Abundantly, painfully clear.

“I love your songs,” she said.

“You’ve never heard my songs.”

Her eyes stung with unshed tears, and they didn’t speak again as they drove up the driveway to the house.

And when they got there, there was a car parked in front.



CHAPTER SIXTEEN


COLT WAS STILL feeling raw from the conversation in the car, and it was one he had never intended to have. Not at all. Not even a little bit. He had never spoken those words out loud to anyone. He never had to. Because Jake knew, and nobody else ever needed to know. But he’d told her. And it had come from somewhere deep inside of him that he preferred never to acknowledge or think about. That he preferred never to access. And he’d given her the keys to it.

What the hell?

But then they pulled into the driveway, and the car was there.

And he knew exactly whose car was.

“Colt...”

“It’s okay,” he said.

But he didn’t know it was okay. He didn’t know what to think or what to feel, and fundamentally, he could see right now, looking at Cheyenne’s car in that driveway, that he had been heavily in denial this whole time. That he hadn’t really known what he was hoping for.