Chapter 31
thirty-one
COLT
The post driver came down hard, the vibration rattling up through my arms and settling deep in my shoulders.
Sweat ran down my spine and pooled at the waistband of my jeans.
I’d been out here since seven, replacing the rotted posts along the east fence line, and my body had finally hit that numb, grinding rhythm where the work took over and my head went quiet.
I liked the quiet. I’d spent three years chasing it.
The chain around my neck swung forward with every strike, the pendant tapping against my bare chest in a steady beat. I didn’t reach for it. Didn’t need to. It was always there. The only piece of him I had left that I could hold.
I scented her before I saw her, her sweet signature carrying on the wind. Except it was overripe and bruised at the edges. I lowered the driver and turned, wiping sweat from my jaw with the back of my forearm.
Julia stood ten feet away. Grass seed clung to the hem of her jeans, and there was a smear of dirt on her cheek from whatever she’d been doing up at the grove. She was breathing hard, but the exertion wasn’t from the walk.
Her face was wrong.
The color had drained out of her cheeks, leaving her olive skin ashen beneath the flush of sun. Her brown eyes were wide and glassy with a look I recognized deep in my bones, the expression of a person who’d just had the ground ripped out from under them.
My hands went slack on the post driver. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
She shook her head and swallowed hard before licking her lips and shocking the hell out of me.
“Who’s Easton?”
Two words. A two syllable name. And the quiet I’d spent three years building shattered like glass on concrete.
My fingers found the chain before I could stop them, wrapping around the pendant in a white-knuckled grip. The metal bit into my palm, warm from the sun and my skin.
“Where did you—” My voice came out scraped and thin. I cleared my throat, my gaze dropping to the grass clippings covering her jeans, the dirt on her hands. “The grove…”
She nodded, watching me, waiting. Giving me the same steady, patient focus she’d given me in the truck after the school run and the meadow at dawn. Julia didn’t fill silences with unnecessary noise. She held them open and let you walk through on your own terms.
Which I needed right now, to process. She’d found the plaque.
The one I’d bolted to the river stone and set into the earth myself, back when my heart was raw and my head was still ringing with the sound of hooves on hard-packed dirt.
Back when I thought marking the spot would help me let go, before I realized nothing was ever going to do that.
I set the post driver against the fence and pulled my gloves off. One finger at a time. Slow, deliberate, giving my hands a task so they’d stop shaking. I tucked the gloves into my back pocket and gripped the post driver, hoping it would help ground me like it did the posts I’d been setting.
“Easton is—was—my brother,” I told her, barely able to rasp it out.
The correction burned on the way out. Three years and I still couldn’t land on the right tense. He was my brother. He is my brother. Both were true, and yet in their own ways, both felt wrong.
Julia didn’t flinch at the stumble, but her breath caught, a sharp sound that she tried to swallow before I heard it.
Her hand came up to her mouth, fingers pressing hard against her lips, and her eyes went liquid.
She blinked fast, fighting it, her jaw doing that stubborn clench I’d watched her use half a dozen times when she refused to let herself break.
And I knew she was trying to be strong for me. Trying not to make this about her reaction so I’d keep talking.
That almost wrecked me worse than the question had.
“We rode together,” I started, staring at the fence line because looking at her meant falling apart and I wasn’t ready for that.
“Broncs mostly. Some bulls when we were younger and too stupid to know better. East was...” A rough exhale pushed through my teeth.
“He was the better rider. Braver. Looser in the chute. He’d be cracking jokes while they were rigging his bronc, had every cowboy in earshot laughing when they should’ve been in their own heads getting ready. ”
My thumb dug into the grain of the post driver’s handle.
“He found this pack. Dragged me out here to meet them because he was dead certain this was home.” My voice roughened. “And he was right. These guys became our family. East fit like he’d always been here, and I followed because that’s what I did. Where he went, I went.”
I swallowed against the tightness climbing my throat. The chain felt heavier than it ever had.
“The circuit came through town three years ago. I got nostalgic. Told him we should ride again, for old times’ sake.” The words tasted like ash. “He said yes because he always said yes when it was me askin’.”
I stopped. My jaw locked down so hard my teeth ached, and I had to force the next part out through a throat that wanted to seal shut.
“The fall was fast. Bad draw, worse landing. The horse came down wrong and East—” I gripped the post driver until my knuckles bleached white. “I was at the rail. Close enough to hear it. Close enough that I should’ve been able to do something.”
The wind moved through the grass between us. Julia hadn’t moved. Hadn’t spoken. She stood exactly where she’d planted herself, hands at her sides, letting me bleed at my own pace.
“He died in the arena that afternoon.” I stared at the fence post, unable to look at her.
“I thought about leaving after. Thought about packing a bag and driving until the road ran out. In some ways, it would’ve been easier to disappear.
Start over somewhere his ghost couldn’t find me.
” My grip tightened on the post driver. “But these guys are my family. The kids... I watched Wyatt take his first steps on the porch of that house. I held Sunny the night she came home. I couldn’t walk away from them any more than I could walk away from East.” I swallowed hard.
“And leaving the ranch meant leaving the last place he ever was. If I left, I’d lose him all over again, and I couldn’t survive that twice. ”
The silence that followed was heavy enough to feel, pressing down on both of us while the wind carried the distant sound of cattle lowing in the south pasture.
“The grove,” Julia said quietly. “You created that spot for him? Like a memorial?”
“He used to go out there to think. Said the cottonwoods were the only place on the property where you could hear yourself think.” A ghost of something that wasn’t quite a smile pulled at my mouth.
“East wasn’t built for quiet, but when he needed it, that’s where he went.
Sat under that tree for hours sometimes.
We all knew if he wasn’t in the barn or the arena, he was in the grove. ”
I let go of the fence rail and crossed my arms over my bare chest, needing to hold myself together through the memories.
“After he died, I wanted the pack to have somewhere to go. Somewhere that was his. So I built the bench. Set the plaque. Planted a garden around it because East always gave me shit about never growing anything.” My jaw worked.
“First winter killed most of the plants. I told myself I’d fix it in the spring. ”
I exhaled through my nose, slow and controlled, the way I did before a ride when the chute was about to open.
“When spring came, Boone offered to help tend it. River too. But I told them it was mine to handle.” I stared past her at the mountains, watching the clouds drag their shadows across the peaks.
“I made it to the tree line that first spring and stood there staring at the bench until my legs went numb. Couldn’t take another step.
Every season after, I’d promise myself it would be different.
I’d grab the tools, walk the path, and the second I got close enough to see the grove, my chest would lock up and I’d have to turn back.
I could feel him out there. Still can. And sitting where he used to sit meant sitting with what I—”
My voice quit on me. Just stopped, like my vocal cords had flat out given up the ghost. I worked my jaw, tried to push through it, but the words wouldn’t come. I swallowed twice before I could scrape together enough to finish.
“—what I talked him into. The apology I owe him that I’ve never figured out how to say.”
My fingers dug into my own arms hard enough to leave marks.
“So the weeds grew. And I let them. And after a while, it was easier to pretend the grove didn’t exist than face what I’d let it become.”
Julia’s hand came up to press flat against her sternum, like she could hold her heart together and keep it from breaking. Her eyes were glassy but she wasn’t crying. She was holding it—holding all of it—the way she always did. For me.
“Nobody’s tended it since,” I managed. “Until you.”
She was quiet for a long time, and I let the silence surround us, knowing more than most that sometimes silence held more than words.
Her gaze drifted toward the direction of the grove.
You couldn’t even see if from here, yet I knew that’s what she was thinking about.
The grove and the man she’d never gotten to know.
The man I’d inadvertently stolen from her.
Fuck. My chest felt like it was about to cave in on itself.
I wanted to apologize, to beg for her forgiveness, but instead, I gave her the room to sit with it. I owed her that much.
She didn’t retreat. She didn’t offer a hollow platitude or tell me it wasn’t my fault.