Chapter 24 #2
“I’ll drive you,” she choked out through her tears.
“I called Mason. He should be here after his delivery to Jones.”
She lifted her chin. “You’re not a parts order, Austin. I’m taking you to the airport.”
I didn’t argue again. You learn, after enough firefights and family dinners, which hills are worth dying on.
We loaded the duffel into the back of the truck. Inspector watched from the porch rail. I was going to miss the cat. The goats bleated at the fence line. The new barn gleamed in the distance, catching what little light there was.
Milly slid behind the wheel. I took the passenger seat, which felt wrong already. She always rode shotgun. We were messing with the order of things.
The heater wheezed to life. She backed down the drive, tires crunching over packed snow. We rode in silence until Everwood’s main street unfurled ahead. Last night’s snow was piled at the curb.
Sue’s SUV was parked in front of the library. Mason’s truck sat outside the hardware store.
“They’ll miss you,” Milly said suddenly.
“Who?”
“The town,” she said. “Mason. Cassie. Levi.”
We passed the sign for the county airport turnoff, and my chest tightened. I took a deep breath. In all the years I’d served, there had always been a little fear. That fear keeps you alive, but the knot in my chest felt more like an ending than the mission ahead.
“How’s your arm?” she asked, eyes on the road.
“Doesn’t like the cold much.” I smiled at that, but it faded quickly.
“You could stay,” she said at last. “You know that, right?”
I smiled and nodded, not trusting my voice.
Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel.
The little terminal building huddled under inches of snow. Its glass doors fogged from the heat inside. A couple of trucks sat in the parking lot. There were no big crowds and no lines. Just a short hop to Denver and a life I wasn’t sure I wanted anymore.
Milly pulled into the drop-off lane and put the truck in park. The engine idled, humming low.
“Well,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
Words had never been less helpful.
I unbuckled, then hesitated. “You know you can call or text me anytime, no matter the hour, right?”
“You’ll answer my messages,” she asked sarcastically, trying to lighten the mood.
I wanted to reach for her, but I was afraid it would dissolve my resolve. Milly didn’t tell me I could stay until I booked the flight. For days, we’d walked in silence. Until this morning, she hadn’t asked me to stay. But was that out of fear, or love?
She leaned across the console and took my hand. Her scent filled the truck, coffee, hay, and whatever soap lived in the upstairs bathroom. I memorized it, knowing I might not ever smell it again.
“Be safe,” she said through sobs.
“You too,” I said. “Watch the ice near the north pasture gate. It gets slick.”
Her eyes shone, but she kept her chin up. “Go on. Before I decide to block the curb and cause a scene.”
“There are worse ways to get arrested,” I said.
“Go,” she repeated, softer.
I opened the door and grabbed my duffel. The cold hit hard. I stepped out, then leaned down to see her one more time. She looked small in the driver’s seat.
“Milly,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I love you.” I said it one last time, then walked into the building, leaving her behind.
Inside the terminal, a breeze ran from the doors to the check-in counter. I checked in, went through security, and sat at the gate with my duffel between my boots and the knowledge I’d just done something both necessary and profoundly stupid.
Boarding was called. I took my seat by the window and buckled in. The plane’s engines whined to life. As we lifted off, Everwood shrank below. Then the clouds swallowed it.
Somewhere over the mountains, turbulence hit, and I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the sound of my past haunting me, the yells, the gunfire, the turbulence before the crash. I jammed my hands into my jacket pockets to quiet my fidgeting fingers.
My fingers brushed metal.
I fished it out.
Keys.
My copy of the ranch keys—house, barn, clinic, gate, padlock on the old shed. All of them threaded onto the ring with the little brass tag that said E.T. in Penny’s neat, bossy handwriting.
I closed my fist around them and saw it—the slight bump of her hand against my side when she’d kissed me, the way she’d pressed in a little harder.
You sneaky, brilliant woman.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or swear. I laughed under my breath and held onto the keys like a talisman all the way to Denver.
From there, everything was a blur. I barely remember the landing or the cab ride to my old apartment.
I registered it all when I pulled out the keys to the Montana ranch instead of my Denver apartment.
The contrast between the two sets of keys was laughable.
The ranch keys were chipped, dinged, scuffed, dirty, and scratched.
The apartment keys were shiny and almost untouched.
I opened the door to a past I’d forgotten about until a few weeks ago.
It looked exactly the way I’d left it—perfect lines, the same gray couch, the same black coffee table, the same half-empty bookshelf with more manuals than novels.
One set of dishes and the sound of a humming refrigerator and non-stop traffic outside.
Everything looked the same apart from the small layer of dust from months of neglect, but it felt hollow and foreign.
“Your orphan,” Mrs. Worthington said from the doorway, in her cardigan, hair piled up in curlers. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten him.” The plant I’d dumped on my neighbor seven months ago sat in her arms, greener than it had ever been with me.
“I’d never forget about him,” I smiled, taking the pot. It smelled like generic potting mix, instead of hay or goats.
“You look different,” she said, squinting at me over her glasses.
“How so?”
“Softer,” she said. “In the eyes. And less like you’re about to leap out of your skin.”
She sniffed, “Hmm.” It was a universal sound. She knew I was lost, and she was too polite to say it outright. “Well. Water that plant.”
“Thanks for taking care of him,” I said.
“He needed a home,” she said, and then, pointedly, “Everyone does.”
After she left, the apartment sucked in around me.
Even with the traffic right outside the window, it was too quiet. No chickens, or horses, or noisy goats. The hum of the fridge and the tick of the wall clock echoed.
I set the plant on the windowsill. Outside, the city moved—cars, buses, people in puffy coats hunched against the cold. It was familiar, but it felt anemic.
No rooster announcing the dawn. No goats arguing over hay fences. No soft clatter of Milly in the kitchen, talking to herself and asking Penny for advice. No creak of the third stair. No cat trying to trip me, and no Milly humming a tune no one knew.
I tossed my duffel on the bed and stood in the middle of the living room, hands on my hips, waiting for the sense of relief I’d always felt coming home from a job.
It didn’t come.
For the next few days, I ordered takeout Chinese food and ate alone. I watched a movie alone and went to bed in a house alone.
Come Monday morning, I went to the office.
It was a large building that sat between its twin and a yoga studio. The sign on the frosted glass door felt wrong. Reaper’s name itself wasn’t on it, but his fingerprints were in every account.
“Look what the goat dragged in,” Reaper drawled from his desk when I walked in.
His hair was cut short. Same white shirt buttoned all the way up, a jacket with patched elbows.
Screens glowed around him. Through the whole trip, I’d spoken to him about Milly and the ranch, but seeing him behind a desk in a suit instead of his Navy uniform, the one I saw in my nightmares from that night, made me laugh.
I hung my coat on the rack by the door.
He gave me a once-over. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean, you still sound like you, but you look all wrong,” he said, squinting. “Haunted.”
“If you’re flirting with me,” I said, batting my eyes.
Reaper might be my boss, but he was also my CO in the Navy.
He’d seen me at my best and my worst. When I left the Navy, he offered me a job.
He helped me rebuild my life. I’d gone to school for accounting and estate accounting before and during the Navy.
I just never thought I’d have to fall back on it. Reaper gave me that fresh start.
“Maybe,” he joked. “But I have an HR training video that says no.”
Behind him, my office waited, desk, chair, files stacked in neat piles. It had once been the center of my universe.
“I honestly thought you’d come back within a week,” Reaper said.
“You have very little faith in me.” I sat in the chair opposite his desk.
“Oh, I have tons of faith,” he countered. “But when you brought up an asset named Milly, I had second thoughts. Now, after seeing you, I’m not sure what to think.”
Harris looked up from his cluttered desk when he heard me. Late forties, old money, and not coldhearted enough to be the bad guy in the courtroom, but his eyes missed nothing.
“Adams,” he said, gripping my hand. “You look like you got run through a combine.”
“Close,” I laughed. “Montana. It’ll do that.”
He sat in a chair next to me. “How’s the ranch?”
“On fire,” I said automatically, then corrected myself. “Was. Past tense. It’s… rebuilding. Pole barn went up. Clinic opens tomorrow.”
“And the account?” he asked.
I thought of Milly on the porch, the way her voice had wobbled when I told her I was leaving. “She’s… good,” I said. “Strong. Stubborn. Browne already filed the paperwork.”
He nodded slowly. “I meant the estate.”
Right. The numbers.