Chapter 9
The Next Morning
The previous evening had been quiet.
They’d eaten sandwiches over the kitchen island, the space between them occupied by the ghost of the afternoon’s adrenaline.
Grant had been brief, his questions about her riding history clipped and precise, his eyes never quite settling on hers for more than a second.
He was retreating into himself, back to the stoic rancher who didn’t have room for complications.
Izzy had let him. She’d gone to bed early, her muscles humming with a fatigue she hadn’t felt in years.
When she woke, the bill for yesterday’s heroics had come due.
Her thighs felt like they’d been hammered into lead, and a sharp, nagging ache radiated from her lower back every time she reached for her coffee.
She moved with a stiff, gingerly grace that made her feel more like eighty than thirty-one, but the soreness felt honest—a physical reminder that she still knew how to hunt down a thrill.
By afternoon, however, the stiffness couldn’t outweigh the pull of the trail. The ride. The speed. The way it had felt—easy and familiar in a way nothing else had in a long time.
She found Ghost again.
Now that they knew she could ride a horse, Izzy had been granted permission to ride Ghost whenever he was free from lessons, as long as she promised no jumping or dramatic chases.
It felt marvelous to be on a horse again.
The smell of the farm and the breeze through the trees took her straight back to Colorado at seventeen—to expensive tack, early mornings, and a trainer she’d once mistaken for love.
She laughed to herself.
The trail narrowed the farther she rode.
Fence line gave way to trees. Gravel softened into dirt, then into something barely marked at all.
Izzy let the horse pick his way forward. The vegetation grew thicker.
It was quiet out here. A flash of memory hit her—another trail, another quiet stretch of woods. Evan’s voice.
She shoved it away.
She almost missed it.
The cabin sat tucked back off the rise, half-hidden behind a stand of trees, weathered gray and settling into the land like it had been there longer than anything around it.
Thick vines crawled up the walls and across the sagging porch rail, choking the posts, while brambles and undergrowth pressed in tight around the foundation, almost swallowing the lower half of the structure.
One corner of the roof had dipped.
The back side sagged just slightly. Not abandoned long enough to disappear.
But long enough to be forgotten.
Izzy slowed.
Then stopped.
Something about it pulled.
She swung down, looped the reins over the hitching post out front, and stepped toward the door.
It stood open.
“Hello?” she called lightly.
Nothing answered.
She pushed the door. It groaned, a heavy, protesting sound that echoed too loudly in the hollow space.
Dust. Old wood. And a quiet, unsettled feeling, like the room was still waiting for someone who never came back.
Izzy stepped inside, her boots clicking on the floorboards. The light came in thin through the windows, catching suspended particles that hadn’t been disturbed in a generation.
It wasn’t just empty; it was interrupted.
A ceramic mug sat on a side table, a dark, fuzzy ring of ancient mold at the bottom. A pair of reading glasses sat next to a stack of mail from August 1999. A cardigan hung over the back of a chair, looking like it was waiting for someone who never came back.
But it was the art that stopped her.
The first painting leaned against the far wall, unfinished.
A mountain ridge at dusk—deep shadow, light caught along the edge of rock, color layered in a way that wasn’t obvious at first glance but built the longer you looked.
A fine web stretched from one top corner to the beam above, dust thick in the threads.
Izzy stepped closer, her gallery manager’s eye immediately cataloging the brushwork.
Every wall was covered. Every surface held a story.
Canvases were stacked like cordwood along the baseboards, their edges furred with dust, spiderwebs veiling corners and frames.
Some leaned three and four deep, the oldest ones yellowed at the varnish, the newer ones still holding a ghost of their original sheen beneath the grime.
An easel stood near the single window, a half-finished canvas still clamped in its jaws.
The palette beside it had hardened into islands of color, paint pans cracked and dry where they’d been left out to set and never cleaned.
Brushes lay in a chipped ceramic jar, their bristles splayed and stiff, handles coated in a thin film of dust.
Charcoal studies lay scattered across a rough table next to them, the paper curled at the edges and smudged by time.
Faces and hands and ridgelines watched her from the yellowing sheets.
Webs stitched the gaps between chair legs and table legs, fine silver strands catching what little light filtered in.
Masterpieces, she thought. Not polished and framed, not curated and lit—just… here. Raw. Immediate. As if the artist had stepped out for a moment and somehow never come back.
She crouched near a stack of canvases, brushing a thick layer of gray dust away from the corner of a frame.
A date: ’99. And a name, signed in a small, cramped hand.
Clara Vale.
Izzy frowned.
“No…”
But the work—
She stood, turning slowly.
The back door stood ajar.
She pushed it open and stepped out onto the deck.
The view hit her all at once.
Mountains rose up behind the cabin, jagged and close, rock breaking through tree line, light shifting across them in long, late-afternoon shadows.
Raw. Untouched. Stunning.
An artist’s dream.
And then—something else.
She crossed to another canvas inside.
This one different. Wider. Softer.
The farm.
Grant’s farm. Maybe?
From above.
From here.
Her fingers traced the air just above the surface without touching it.
“How long ago…?” she murmured. “Nineteen ninety-nine.”
She could almost see the place in reverse—before the barns, before the arenas, just pasture and potential.
Driven by a sudden flare of curator’s focus, Izzy slipped the sketchbook under her arm and lifted the canvas carefully in both hands.
The angle bothered her.
The mountain ridge in the painting sat higher than it should’ve from the cabin porch, the line of the trees different somehow. Clara hadn’t painted this standing here.
Izzy stepped off the deck and into the tall grass beyond the clearing, her eyes moving between the canvas and the ridgeline behind the cabin.
The woods swallowed her quickly.
Under the dense canopy of ancient hemlocks and oaks, the afternoon light vanished almost entirely, plunging everything into a cooler, dim green twilight.
Dampness clung to the air. Massive boulder faces rose from the earth, carpeted in thick emerald moss that muffled the sound of her boots.
Fallen trees lay rotting into the forest floor, their trunks softened by years of rain and mountain weather.
It was beautiful in a way that felt untouched by the modern valley below.
Ancient.
Wild.
She kept moving, climbing slowly until she reached a steep ridgeline where the heavy branches finally split apart.
Through the narrow opening in the canopy, a jagged gray rock face cut sharply against the sky.
Izzy stopped cold.
Her breath caught as she slowly raised the canvas, aligning the painted ridgeline with the distant peak.
Clara had stood here.
The realization slid cold across her skin.
Then the woods fell silent.
Izzy lowered the painting slowly.
No birds.
No wind moving through the branches.
Nothing.
A sharp crack echoed somewhere deeper in the trees.
Izzy spun toward the sound.
“Who’s there?”
The mountain gave nothing back.
But the feeling stayed.
Watching.
The memory hit hard and fast—Evan Cole’s shadow against the riverbank, the roar of white water below them, the sickening certainty right before he shoved her.
Her lungs seized.
Her skin flashed hot, then cold.
It was the choking certainty of eyes fixed on her from somewhere beyond the trees.
Panic detonated under her ribs.
Abandoning the search, Izzy clutched the painting and sketchbook tightly against her and turned back toward the clearing, stumbling over roots and uneven ground as she hurried downhill through the trees.
She didn’t slow until she burst back into the cabin, shoving the heavy door closed behind her.
She leaned hard against the wall, trying to force air back into her lungs.
“You planning on staying out here all night?”
Izzy screamed.
The sound ripped out of her before she could stop it.
Her boots slipped on the dusty floorboards as she jerked backward, the painting flying from her hands.
Grant caught her before she hit the floor.
His hands clamped around her waist, hauling her hard against him as the momentum knocked his hat loose and sent it rolling across the cabin floor.
Silence crashed over the room.
Izzy’s fingers twisted into the rough denim of his shirt, her pulse hammering against her ribs. Grant stared down at her, his flint-blue eyes intense beneath the low cabin light. He didn’t let go, his grip tightening at her waist, anchoring her closer.
Too close.
For one charged heartbeat neither of them moved. His gaze dipped to her mouth. The air between them turned dangerously thin. He leaned down just a fraction—
“Cowboy…” Izzy whispered, still trying to recover air. “Between your bats and you sneaking up on me, I’m not going to make it to thirty-three.”
Grant froze. A low, gravelly huff of laughter escaped him as the tension cracked—but he didn’t quite step back.
“I didn’t sneak,” he rumbled. “I’ve been calling your name for ten minutes. You were miles away.”
Slowly, he eased her back onto her feet, his hands lingering at her hips longer than necessary before he made himself let go.
Cool air rushed into the space his body had occupied. Izzy’s mouth felt dry; her tongue flicked out to wet her lower lip before she could stop herself. Heat flooded her cheeks as much from that tiny betrayal as from the scare.