Chapter Eighteen
Where the Road Led Me
Kentucky had always been home.
Short Fork. Falcon Road. Paintsville. Johnson Fork.
Those weren't simply names on a map. They were pieces of me.
Kentucky held almost every version of me.
Then Bull came along.
And suddenly Georgia wasn't just another state.
It was where she was.
? ? ?
After that first visit, long distance became harder.
Before I'd met Bull in person, FaceTime had felt like enough. Afterward, I knew exactly what was missing.
So we talked. We planned. We looked forward to seeing each other again.
But underneath all of that was a question neither of us could avoid forever: Where was this going?
Kentucky was my life. Georgia was Bull's.
If we were serious about building something together, at some point those two lives had to meet.
? ? ?
By this point in my life, I paid attention to different things.
Could we talk when something bothered us? Could we laugh when life wasn't going according to plan? Could we be quiet together? Could I be myself around her?
I wanted peace.
With Bull, I began understanding how different peace felt.
Peace wasn't boring. It was being able to breathe inside your own life.
? ? ?
Eventually, the distance had to change.
That meant leaving Kentucky.
My roots were there. My parents were there. My childhood was there. My children had grown up there. My family was there.
But I had learned something about home.
A place can hold your history without holding your future.
Leaving Kentucky didn't mean rejecting where I came from. You don't leave those things at a state line. You carry them.
So I did.
? ? ?
Georgia became part of my story.
At first, it was Bull's world. I was the one adjusting.
Two grown women come with habits and opinions. Lots of opinions.
Bull and I learned each other in everyday life, not through a screen anymore.
Sometimes love looks like laughing in the kitchen. Sometimes it's sitting outside talking. Sometimes it's getting on each other's nerves and being over it twenty minutes later.
I was learning how happiness could simply feel.
? ? ?
I hadn't lost Kentucky. It had simply stopped being the only place where my life could happen.
Bull and I began building routines of our own.
One day you realize you're saying we more often than I.
Our lives weren't visiting each other anymore.
They were joining.
I didn't want everything I'd survived to make me afraid of everything I might still have.
? ? ?
Bull and I talked about marriage.
This time, the idea didn't come from other people telling me what I should do.
I was a grown woman who understood what a wedding could promise and what it couldn't.
Marriage couldn't guarantee that life would always be easy.
But I could choose the person I wanted beside me while we lived it.
I wanted Bull.
? ? ?
As we began thinking about the wedding, there was someone I wished could be there.
Bull's mother.
I never knew her personally. I knew her through stories and through the woman she helped raise. I'd heard she was a caring woman.
Bull had a pendant that had belonged to her mother.
I would attach it to my bouquet.
Something borrowed.
A small piece of her mother carried with me as I walked toward her daughter.
My parents wouldn't physically be there either.
But absence didn't mean they couldn't be part of the day.
We carry people in different ways.
? ? ?
August 6, 2026 was getting closer.
Soon I would stand beside Bull.
Soon the woman I'd first known through a phone screen would become my wife.
For once, I wasn't starting over because something had ended.
I was beginning because something beautiful was about to start.
And I was ready.