Chapter Two #2
You do know that not everybody hates Montana as much as you do, right?
Ramona had replied, with a lot less patience than when she had been a college student.
Or maybe she just didn’t feel the need to be quite as careful any longer, as a grown-up doctor and all.
It’s actually a famous and beloved tourist destination.
And Cowboy Point isn’t the town you grew up in.
You haven’t been back in what? Thirty years?
Either way, it’s a waste of your talent, her mother had said. With a certain stubbornness Ramona had reluctantly come to realize was a family trait.
That’s where you’re wrong, Ramona had told her. Calmly. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted to focus my talent on. I’m opening a clinic. I’m going to take care of the community Grandpa loved. I think he’d be pleased.
Of course he would be pleased, her mother had shot back at her. He was always pleased when he got his own way. But then she had hugged Ramona, fiercely. I’m sure you’ll be the brightest light that town has ever seen.
Ramona didn’t know about that. But what she didn’t want was to become a cautionary tale about out-of-staters who came into Montana and had no idea what they were doing.
So she had picked her mother’s brain and done significant research before she’d moved.
After her years in Chicago, she felt pretty sure that she could handle the winters, but she hadn’t lived in a rural area in Chicago, obviously.
That was the difference. She was used to the cold, and the snow, but she wasn’t responsible for clearing any of it or getting around in it when it wasn’t cleared.
The truck had been her first major Montana purchase. She needed it to be a kind of tank that could get her anywhere, through any kind of weather, and that she could sleep in if she had to. That was something she’d tested out when she’d driven out from Chicago.
She’d known that she would also need the truck to be a kind of clinic on wheels, especially when she did house calls, and it was.
Even at the height of summer, she would still be contending with the Rocky Mountains in all their glory and it always was wise to have a healthy respect for what mountains might bring to any situation.
Ramona had more than enough respect. Especially with her truck.
She had moved out one June and had set about renovating the house.
She’d had it all planned out in advance, and had talked to all the necessary people and institutions to make it happen.
She wanted to set herself up as a clinic, making it so folks didn’t have to go skidding down that terrifying road into Marietta when they were already hurt or sick. That was her first priority.
But she’d also wanted to find her own place in the community her grandfather had left behind.
Ramona had figured that it wouldn’t be too hard to make friends because she’d always been good at that, and she hadn’t been wrong on that score.
There were all kinds of interesting people in Cowboy Point.
She’d found Cat Lisle—now Cat Carey—at the pizza place purely by chance.
Now she couldn’t imagine running the clinic without her.
She, Cat, and the Carey wife who had once been a Stark, Rosie, spent a lot of time together.
She’d also started becoming friends with the latest Carey family addition by marriage, Sierra Tate.
Her goal for the new year coming in fast was to spend less time with members of the Carey family. Because as much as she liked her friends, it really wasn’t any good for her mental health. Proximity to Knox made her do stupid things.
Ramona was very tired of being stupid.
The conventional wisdom was that folks who moved to Montana in the summer suffered through one winter and slunk off back to where they came from because they couldn’t take it. It was true. Ramona had seen a significant uptick in friendliness when she’d made it through her first winter.
You must be done with this experiment by now, her mother had said when they’d talked, earlier today.
Or yesterday, Ramona corrected herself, looking at the clock on her dashboard that read 1:56 in the morning.
It’s been a smashing success, and who could be surprised?
It’s you. You make all of these uphill battles look easy. But surely it’s time to come home.
Ramona hadn’t thought through her response. I am home, she had told her mother.
That had not gone over well.
Now, out here in this treacherous dark—inching along the road that was more of a suggestion she held in the back of her mind than any actual passageway—she had time to think that through.
And the truth was, it did feel like home. Finally, she’d found her way home.
The only fly in all that ointment was Knox.
Because Ramona had met him on her very first night as a Montana resident.
She had driven up Copper Mountain, and parked the truck she now knew that she could live in for weeks at a time, if necessary, behind her grandfather’s old house.
She’d spent most of the afternoon caught between nostalgia and overwhelm.
Because while it was a delight to be back in the place that she had loved so much as a girl, it also wasn’t the same place she remembered.
It had been left to its own devices for far too long.
She had walked around the property, set back from the main road that led into the little community of Cowboy Point, near where the tiny local library stood.
There was a falling down shed out back, but the house itself was sturdy.
She had already figured out the layout in her head and how she would turn the ground floor into a clinic with her own living area upstairs.
Maybe one day she’d renovate the shed, too.
All of those dreams had seemed doable on the drive out here, across the Midwest and through the grasslands and the rolling plains. But once she’d actually arrived, she’d found that she questioned her ability to do any of it.
So she’d taken a long shower and had walked into town to see if there was any food to be had on that first, bright June evening.
She had found Mountain Mama Pizza bustling, with a band out on the patio beneath strings of happy lights. She’d gotten herself a beer and one of their special pizzas, and even though she hadn’t known a single soul in that restaurant that night, she had felt her optimism rising again.
Because it felt like the kind of place she wanted to call her own.
It felt like the Cowboy Point she remembered from her summers with her grandfather.
He had known everyone in town, just as all those people that night had seemed to know each other.
It was different from the town she had grown up in back in New Hampshire that was far more manicured and tailored to the fancy college that was at the center of all life there.
They kept the wilderness to the White Mountains in the north and pretty photographs of the snow when it fell in town.
Cowboy Point felt more genuine to her, somehow. Maybe that was why she’d liked it so much all along.
She had finished eating and had been enjoying a second beer when Knox had walked by her table and smiled at her.
And Ramona had debated this a lot, looking back.
Had it been that moment? Had it been as simple as that smile? Or the way he’d stopped still as if he’d hit an invisible wall, and could do nothing at all but stare at her?
She had certainly felt the electricity between them. It should have been shocking—but the way he smiled made it feel more like honey all through her body.
Not less shocking, but sweeter.
“Why don’t I know you?” he had asked, and that smile of his had made what should have been a clichéd sort of line feel new, real, and breathless. “Please tell me who you are so we can rectify that as soon as possible.”
He had sat down with her at that table and that had been the beginning of it all.
Since then, everything between them had been that same explosive, electric conflagration, too sweet and too hot to bear, and time hadn’t dulled it at all.
Over the past year and a half, there had been times when she’d thought that it might work out. When he’d spent every night in her bed, or she’d been a fixture in his, and she had been certain that it all had to mean something.
But it never did.
Or, if she was brutally honest with herself, it had never meant what she wanted it to mean.
And she had come to the reluctant, painful conclusion that if she wanted the life she’d always dreamed about having here, she needed to insist on more.
So she had.
And Knox Carey had declined the offer to step into that kind of intensity. Or anything that hinted at something permanent. It was a line he refused to cross.
That, of course, really should have been the end of it. To her enduring shame, it wasn’t. The end had come much later, after months and months of heartache and hooking up and hurting herself with her own feelings again and again and again.
Now here they were, having not interacted at all in two months, which was a record. And even though she was driving to his house in the middle of the night—not exactly a new thing in their tortured little story—Ramona reminded herself that this was not a booty call.
There was a baby in the mix. In case she had been tempted to think he was making that up, she’d heard the unmistakable sounds of an infant through the phone.
Ramona would like to believe that she wouldn’t have gone if she hadn’t heard those sounds, having moved on and all, but she wasn’t sure that was true—and that was lowering. Extremely lowering.
Up before her in the middle of the swirling snow, she saw the tall posts she was looking for loom up out of the dark. And up on top, the wooden sign that read High Mountain Ranch.
Ramona felt relief wash all through her, though she wouldn’t have admitted it if anyone asked. Especially if that anyone was Knox.