Chapter 17 Goodbye, Blackthorn #2
By all the things I'd destroyed.
I stepped inside the house.
The familiar rooms greeted me with absolute indifference.
The kitchen.
The hallway.
The office.
Everything looked exactly the same.
Which somehow made it worse.
Nothing reflected the fact that my entire world had just walked away.
I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator.
Opened it.
Took one sip.
Then dumped the rest down the sink.
The taste made me sick.
Not because of the beer.
Because nothing felt right anymore.
I moved through the house restlessly.
Unable to sit still.
Unable to think.
Unable to stop thinking.
Every room carried memories.
Oliver laughing at something ridiculous.
Oliver sitting at the kitchen table sketching while I worked.
Oliver stealing all the attention from every horse on the property.
God.
Even the horses were going to miss him.
The realization hurt.
Because it was true.
Whiskey was going to be insufferable.
The stubborn horse had practically adopted him.
I laughed once.
The sound echoed through the empty house.
Then disappeared.
The silence that followed felt enormous.
I hated it.
The truth settled deeper with every passing minute.
I'd gotten exactly what I wanted.
Oliver was free.
Free from gossip.
Free from criticism.
Free from a future tied to a man nearly twenty years older than him.
Free from me.
So why did it feel like I'd amputated a limb?
The answer sat waiting.
Simple.
Because love wasn't logical.
And neither was grief.
I spent the next hour pretending to work.
The effort failed spectacularly.
Paperwork remained untouched.
Numbers blurred together.
The ranch could probably collapse financially overnight and I wouldn't have noticed.
My concentration was gone.
My heart had apparently packed its bags and left with Oliver.
Eventually I gave up.
The office felt too small.
The house felt too quiet.
Everything felt wrong.
So I went outside.
The stars stretched across the Texas sky.
Beautiful.
Indifferent.
The same stars we'd spent hours watching together.
The memory hit immediately.
Another wound.
Another reminder.
I wandered across the ranch without a destination.
Past the barns.
Past the corrals.
Past the places that meant something.
The places that hurt.
Eventually my feet carried me toward Whiskey's paddock.
Of course they did.
The horse lifted his head when I approached.
Then immediately looked behind me.
Searching.
Waiting.
My chest tightened.
Even Whiskey noticed.
The horse snorted.
Disappointed.
Then returned to grazing.
Smart animal.
I wished I could be disappointed with myself that easily.
I leaned against the fence.
The night stretched around me.
Silent.
For a while, I simply stood there.
Thinking.
Remembering.
Regretting.
The usual.
Then something caught my eye.
A dark object resting beneath the old oak tree.
Partially hidden in the grass.
My stomach tightened instantly.
No.
Slowly, I crossed the field.
The closer I got, the more certain I became.
The object sat exactly where Oliver always liked to sketch.
The place he'd spent countless afternoons.
The place he'd claimed helped him think.
I crouched down.
Picked it up.
And immediately closed my eyes.
The sketchbook.
Again.
The same black leather cover.
The same worn edges.
The same notebook that once revealed how Oliver saw the world.
Apparently, he'd left it behind.
Or forgotten it.
The distinction didn't matter.
The damage was already done.
For several seconds, I simply stared at it.
A hundred different emotions battled inside my chest.
Then I opened it.
The first page nearly broke me.
Not because of the drawing.
Because of the date.
One of his earliest days at Blackthorn.
The sketch showed the ranch house from a distance.
Simple.
Rough.
The beginning.
I turned another page.
Then another.
The story unfolded.
Not in words.
In drawings.
Oliver's entire summer preserved in graphite and ink.
The ranch.
The workers.
The horses.
The sunsets.
The life he'd built here.
The life I'd helped create.
I kept turning pages.
Unable to stop.
The sketches became more detailed over time.
More confident.
More personal.
And then came the pages filled with me.
Page after page.
Drawing after drawing.
Dozens.
Maybe hundreds.
Ryder repairing fences.
Ryder feeding horses.
Ryder laughing.
Ryder sleeping in a chair.
God.
The idiot had sketched me sleeping.
I should've been embarrassed.
Instead, my vision blurred.
Because every drawing revealed something deeper.
Attention.
Admiration.
Affection.
Love.
The kind of love that noticed everything.
The kind of love that paid attention.
The kind of love that remembered.
I sat down heavily beneath the tree.
The sketchbook resting across my lap.
The night air suddenly felt difficult to breathe.
One page showed me with Midnight.
Not from a photograph.
From memory.
Another showed me teaching Oliver how to repair fencing.
Another captured the storm shelter.
The porch.
The paddock.
The moments that mattered.
The moments I'd carried with me too.
Then I reached the final section.
And completely fell apart.
Future sketches.
Dream sketches.
The same ones I'd found before.
Only now there were more.
Many more.
Pages filled with imagined tomorrows.
The ranch house.
Shared breakfasts.
Quiet evenings beneath the stars.
Two figures growing older together.
Building something together.
Living something together.
A life.
Our life.
Or the life Oliver had wanted.
The realization shattered whatever remained of my defenses.
Because suddenly I understood something I hadn't allowed myself to see before.
Not truly.
Not completely.
Oliver hadn't loved me despite my flaws.
He'd loved all of me.
The broken parts.
The stubborn parts.
The damaged parts.
Everything.
The kid had looked directly at my scars and imagined forever anyway.
A sharp pain spread through my chest.
The kind that had nothing to do with age or old injuries.
Regret.
Pure regret.
I stared at the drawings.
At the evidence.
At the proof of a love I'd been too frightened to trust.
Too frightened to accept.
Too frightened to believe I deserved.
The truth settled over me like a physical weight.
Oliver had loved me deeply.
Completely.
Without hesitation.
And in return, I'd broken his heart.
The sketchbook trembled slightly in my hands.
For the first time since watching his truck disappear down the driveway, I stopped pretending.
Stopped rationalizing.
Stopped hiding behind sacrifice.
Because sitting alone beneath the oak tree, surrounded by pages filled with love, I finally saw the truth with painful clarity.
I hadn't protected Oliver.
I hadn't saved him.
I'd simply destroyed the best thing that ever happened to me.
And for the first time, the possibility of losing him forever felt far more terrifying than any future we'd ever faced together.
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