Chapter 42
ONE YEAR LATER
T he early summer sun bakes down on the asphalt beneath my boots, sending up a shimmering mirage of heat as I walk into the airport terminal. Clutched inside my fist is a stupid goddamn piece of white paper with a name scrawled across it in black marker pen.
With each stride, I square my jaw and do my damndest not to fixate on the last time I walked through these doors almost a year ago.
I try to, and yet fail miserably. As I always do, because every single day in my life brings something that reminds me of her .
The sun beats down on the lonely, aching hole in my world where she’s supposed to be. A life where I’ve had to endure making my own way through the changing seasons, the leaves turning golden, the brutally cold winds and snow drifts swirling in to consume the ranch, and eventually, the budding shoots of green poking their heads above the layers of melting ice.
I’ve had to sleep in an empty bed, remembering all the ways Sage filled my days with the kind of nourishing warmth, goodness, and laughter I’ve never experienced before.
As I draw closer to the arrivals area, there are only a handful of people milling around. This early in the day, the airport is quiet as a churchyard, and even though I don’t feel that same tightness in my chest at the prospect of being noticed nowadays, it’s still always a pleasant relief to simply be able to go about my business uninterrupted.
Especially since my thoughts are primarily occupied by replaying the same scenario from nearly a year ago. A mirror image of life, before everything flipped upside down, and the best thing that I could ever dream of strolled through those doors and into my world.
Then out of it again.
I clutch the sign a little tighter, keeping one eye on the door up ahead while opening up my texts. There are a raft of notifications waiting for me from Tessa that came in while I was driving.
Just had a call that the horse feed has arrived in town. Can you stop by and pick it up on your way back from the airport?
Also, totally forgot to ask you how your session went yesterday? Sorry, these pregnancy hormones are making me feel like my brain has upped and disappeared on me.
Sure, will do.
It went fine. That EMDR shit actually seems to be kinda working.
I’m so proud of you. Hell, and now I’m gonna start crying. AGAIN.
Why did no one warn me getting knocked up is ninety-nine percent crying over stupid crap?
Did you just call me stupid?
Zero out of ten for creativity. Your insults have gone down the drain.
Yes. But I meant it in a loveable, affectionate way.
There’s nothing hotter than a man who goes to therapy. Remember that.
Whatever, baby brain.
Dots bounce on the screen as Tessa types, and my eyes tick up to the doors as I catch sight of them swishing open, but it’s just an older couple tottering through, pushing a trolley of their luggage.
Oscar is at Frontier Days, you know.
Yeah, I saw the footage.
Sage is doing an incredible job. She’s absolutely killing it with those montages and edits.
The videos she’s been posting keep going viral.
I blow out a breath, and the usual grip of longing for her hits me as soon as Tessa brings Sage’s name into the conversation, which she does at least half a dozen times a week. Especially since she figured something must have happened to make Sage leave so abruptly. Tessa only needed to take one glance at me in the aftermath to know the truth about how fucking cut to pieces I was over her being gone. My baby sister is nothing but a pain in my goddamn ass, and this whole getting herself pregnant crap has made it a million times worse. She’s waged a continual campaign, goddamn keeping on at me about winning her back.
She’s not dating anyone, by the way.
How would you know shit? You’re sitting at home propped up with Trash Island reality TV, trying to choose a baby name.
Oscar keeps me in the loop. He’s got all the hot tour gossip.
I’ve been on team ‘get Sage back’ right from the start, remember?
I’m still salty as fuck that raging pustule of a woman tried to make it seem like I was actually friends with her. If I ran into her, I’d gladly let my weak-ass pregnancy bladder leak all over her.
Just as her text pops up, the next wave of passengers start to emerge from the other side of the doors. Holding the sign up, I already pick out the dark head of hair before they’ve stepped beyond the threshold.
Brown eyes meet mine and drift quickly to the sign in my hand before he dips his chin in acknowledgment.
The guy is stacked. Broad shoulders and strong tattooed forearms. The kind of build that comes mostly with genetics, and gets chiseled thanks to working full time on ranches.
“Zeke Rainer?” I crunch the sign and shove it in the back pocket of my jeans before extending a palm.
“Just Raine will do.” He reaches out to shake my hand with a gruff sort of nod. “I could pretend I don’t know your face, but you’re a little too easy to recognize, Beau Heartford.”
“Don’t I know it.” I chuckle. The guy has got one bag with him and looks the spitting image of how I used to travel light when I was on the road all the time. “Call me Beau. You good to head on out?”
“Lead the way, boss.”
My new hire isn’t the type of guy to say a lot, and considering the headspace I’m in, that’s more than ok with me. It’s easy enough to let our spurts of brief conversation stay light. Rodeo. Ranching. The usual shit to casually chat about. He’s just come back from a season in Canada, and the guy certainly has a wild grittiness about him that lets me trust, at one glance, he’ll easily handle the winters here. That fact alone is going to be a godsend around the ranch.
“I’ve been managing alright with a few casuals onboard here and there, but it’ll be good having someone like yourself to split the workload with.”
“Tessa said over the phone that the summer has been completely booked out for months.”
I nod. “I’ve got a young buck who has been managing the trail rides a couple of days a week during spring, but he’s off on the rodeo circuit a lot of the time.”
“And the equine therapy program you’ve got going on is growing?” He reaches up to run a tattooed hand through his unruly hair.
“It is. A friend of mine, our farrier, looks after the rescues for the most part. But between them and the other horses, we’re up to capacity with the stables for now. Somehow, I blinked and ended up with too much bookwork and not enough time to spend in the saddle.”
An easy silence stretches out for a while as the world slips past outside, and the breeze brings some relief from the mid-morning heat blowing through the rolled-down windows.
“The place has done well, considering it’s only your first year?”
I have to swallow down the gut-wrenching sensation that comes with his astute observation. Because, yes, the place is flourishing and growing rapidly, and it’s all thanks to the influence of one particular woman. Who hasn’t been here to see any of the fruits of her hard work.
“Yeah, we have.” My hand lifts off the wheel to readjust my cap. “It’s at the point where we’re underway with plans for new cabin accommodation to be built next spring. Already got bookings ready and waiting, they just keep on rolling in. We just gotta get the goddamn things built first.”
Raine laughs, a low rumbling sort of noise, and scratches at his close-cut beard.
“You’ve certainly had your hands full, haven’t you?”
I shoot him a sidelong glance, to be met with a knowing look. This man knows my career and knows enough about me. He might have been balls-deep in snow while north of the border, but I’m sure he’ll be well aware of how things have played out in the world of Beau Heartford in recent months.
Resting one elbow on the window, I drag a hand over my mouth. “It’s been a ride, and I’d rather go haul my ass onto the back of a bull than go through that kinda shit again.”
“So it’s onwards and upwards from here?” Raine adjusts his weight.
Yeah, it certainly looks to be that way, to the outside world at least. Mandy did her best to make the split turn ugly, even though we’d agreed to terms around public statements and joint media releases. Requests for ‘ privacy during this difficult time ’ and other bullshit like that.
Yet, there were enough stories leaked here and there, the kind that feed the clickbait sites typically swarmed by social media trolls. No guesses as to where they originated from. Most of the articles were complete rubbish, fabricated smear campaign bullshit, and speculation about how the bastard husband of the country music star was to blame for our marriage falling apart.
My therapist had their work cut out to help me work through the overwhelm brought up by some of the nastier bubbles of online chatter. The ones centered on my father, and how it was inevitable that I’d follow in his footsteps to destroy a wonderful marriage. Strangely enough, having it brought up actually helped rip the bandage off crap I’d been stuffing down and trying to avoid for decades. Ironically, the keyboard warriors disappeared as quickly as they popped up. By the time the next round of the gossip cycle had shifted focus elsewhere, I’d managed to work through a whole lot of baggage that had been hanging heavy on my shoulders for far too long.
Thankfully, in amongst it all, no matter how much Mandy tried to manipulate things, her own scheming came back to bite her in a way I couldn’t have seen coming. And it had nothing to do with me.
My wife was ultimately her own undoing. One of the album executives she’d started fucking around with had a spouse with claws even more vicious and vindictive than Mandy herself could ever aspire to possess.
Overnight, her label dropped her like a cold cup of sick. Within a week, she’d been ostracized by her management. And by the time the ink on our divorce papers dried, she was nothing more than a D-list celebrity squawking about Botox and plastic surgery to her rapidly dwindling social media following in order to pay the bills.
It didn’t take long before I found out the truth of what Mandy threatened Sage with before she left. As her career vanished before her eyes, that woman was desperate to try and manipulate everything. To the point she couldn’t resist letting me know of her own volition that she had pried around on my computer and found the photos I had taken of Sage.
My lawyer and Tessa damn near had to rope me to a chair to stop me from doing something stupid, discovering how she’d used her time at the ranch to invade my privacy. God bless my lawyer, who had already been amassing evidence of Mandy’s infidelity over the years. A hefty file sat waiting to be unleashed, and that was enough to persuade her to hand over everything she had on Sage.
I didn’t care if it meant giving away every scrap of leverage over my ex-wife. To make sure Sage was protected? I’d gladly do whatever was necessary. It might be considered foolish to trade years of accumulated proof in return for half a dozen screengrabs, but I’d give anything she demanded.
What it didn’t do was shorten the duration of my agreement. That shit was binding enough that it guaranteed I remained locked into the rest of the year, waiting while the clock ticked down, to see out the stupid fucking duration of time until I was finally rid of Mandy Spires for good.
She got her share of property, a hefty sum of money; I got to ensure the ranch transferred solely to my name and couldn’t ever fall prey to her selfish, greedy clutches.
As of right now? I’m a free man. Or at least that’s what the paperwork sitting in my desk drawer says.
The painful reality is that I still feel like I’m trapped in an empty void, barely surviving the lack of anything from the woman I love beyond all reason.
The second I found her cabin cleared out that day, the echoing silence when she hung up the call. I was left standing clinging onto nothing but her lingering scent. That was the moment the ax fell, and whatever connection we had was severed entirely.
At first, I tried to stay in touch, but Sage never returned any of my messages—it was goddamn clear she didn’t want me to stay in contact while we went our separate ways and sorted our lives out individually. Now, I’m permanently adrift. Stranded, wandering beneath endless skies and riding the ridges and valleys of a picturesque ranch. Yet I still feel like it’s all nothing but hollow achievements if I never get to see her beautiful eyes smile my way at least once more.
To know for certain whether there’s any hope, or if she’s moved on with her life.
Sage is always with me, in these tiny moments, when I feel like I catch the faintest hint of her scent on the breeze. That wild orange sweetness that creeps up on me out of nowhere, and suddenly, I’m right back in the middle of a memory when she insisted on going to see the new horses in the barn that first night we collided together.
“Have you been around horses much?” I murmur over her ear. Physically unable to let her go. My hands feel like they belong on her body, in a way I can't even begin to explain. It's like the skin-on-skin contact with Sage grounds me and calms the whirlwind on the inside.
“No. Not much.” She shakes her dark head of hair ever so slightly.
“You see Mist here, all horses, they have their own unique set of tells. Their habits, the tiniest shift of weight or stamp of a hoof, or flick of their ear.”
“Sounds like a lot to learn.”
“Well, it’s worth putting in the effort. You gotta do the work to earn a horse’s trust. They’re not just gonna give it to you, and they’re much too intelligent to let any old jerk ask them to do something.”
“Fair enough. So how do you learn?”
“Time, mostly. Patience. Hours and hours of patience.”
My head damn near spins thinking back to that night. Replaying that moment, and the darkest depths of irony that this year has been sent to test me beyond belief.
How true those words would come to be.
We pull into Crimson Ridge, and park up in the lot where I need to collect our order of bulk feed. When I check my phone, there are more texts from my sister, and the most recent ones leave me white-knuckling my phone as I read over the screen.
Tessa:
So, are you gonna sit there pouting like a bear with a sore paw? Or are you gonna do something about getting her back?
Remember, you told me yourself.
Your girl loves a grand gesture.