Epilogue
TWO MONTHS LATER
SAGE
Dawson’s alarm goes off at five-thirty, and I have a better use for his discipline than a mountain trail.
I feel him reach for the phone before the second beep even finishes, thumb already moving to silence it, and I catch his wrist in the dark and press it flat to the pillow instead.
“You weren’t planning on running today.”
“I run every day, Sage. Discipline’s the whole brand.”
“Discipline can wait an hour.” I’m already straddling him before he’s fully awake enough to argue the point, and whatever protest he had loaded dies the second I sink down onto him. He groans my name into the dark, both hands finding my hips and holding on.
“Christ, Sage, you’re going to end my whole cardio routine.”
“Cardio’s overrated. This burns more calories.”
“That’s not a peer reviewed statistic.”
“I’m the only peer whose review matters right now.”
He flips me halfway through, laughing when I swat at him for cheating the pace, and by the time the sun’s fully up neither one of us has said one more word about running.
Afterward, his fingers moving slowly through my hair repeatedly, I let myself drift with the luxury of being in bed with this man I adore.
I trace the sagebrush inked into his wrist like I do most mornings now.
The bullet scar on his other arm has gone from angry to pink, fifteen tiny stitches of my own handwriting on either side of it, and I’ve stopped checking it every morning.
I still look. His hand finds the road on my hip in the same easy rhythm, thumb following the line of it into the mountain like he’s done a hundred times without ever asking again what it means.
“You never finished explaining this one,” he says, quiet.
“You never asked twice.”
“I’m asking now. I figured it out myself back in July, watching you decide to stay in this house instead of running the second things got hard. I want to hear if I got it right.”
“You got it right.” I press my palm flat over his, over the ink, over both.
“I got it the year I decided I was always going to have an exit built into my own skin, whether anyone ever tried to keep me or not. It wasn’t ever really about you.
It was about never again being a woman who stayed somewhere because she didn’t think she had anywhere else to go.
” I bring my eyes up to find his eyes. “I don’t need it to mean that anymore.
I still love it. I’m just not that scared girl who got it. ”
“What does it mean now?”
“That I know exactly where the road leads, and I chose to stop walking it.” I kiss the corner of his jaw. “It used to only mean a way out. Now it means I know how to find my way back too. Same as the real one you and I finally stopped fighting over.”
I go quiet a moment, my fingers settling over his heart, letting the silence settle into something that feels like the right place to say the next thing.
“I want to stop,” I say, into it.
“Stop what?”
“The implant. I want it out.” His whole body goes still under me, listening in that careful way he does when he’s decided a sentence matters more than his own next breath. “I want us to try. Not today. Not even this month, necessarily. But soon, Dawson. I want a family with you.”
He doesn’t answer right away. When I look up his eyes have gone wet, nothing composed left in his face at all.
“Yeah.” He kisses me hard, urgent, like the word itself needs proof behind it. “Very soon.”
The aspens turned while we weren’t looking.
Two months married and gold’s already run up every drainage on the Front like somebody dragged a match along the ridgeline and let it burn slow instead of destructive.
The creek brush has gone rust and blood orange, and the sun’s dropped low enough now that everything, the pastures, the fence lines, Broken Sky Mountain itself, looks lit sideways instead of from above.
July never once managed this kind of quiet.
We spend the whole day outside because the weather service has been threatening rain all week and this valley’s finally about to get what it’s been begging for.
Two months with no real moisture, grass gone brittle and pale, ranch hands driving the water truck out to the far pasture twice a day to keep the troughs full because the creek’s running too low to trust. Every rancher between here and the county line’s been watching the sky like you watch a check clear.
Bravo and Briar graze easy in the near pasture, unbothered by any of it.
I banned Dawson’s run this morning and drag him on a hike up the creek trail instead, Cricket ranging ahead of us and doubling back every few minutes to check that neither of us fell behind.
By the time we make it back down, Felony’s found his way into the grain bag on the truck’s tailgate, head buried past the ears, working through it like he was invited, and Dawson doesn’t even argue anymore.
He just hauls the grain bag out of reach, catches Felony by the halter, and walks him back to the barn on foot, the mule’s ears pinned back the whole way like he’s the one being inconvenienced.
“He’s decided the truck belongs to him now.”
“It might. I’ve stopped fighting it.”
We saddle up for the fence line once Felony’s shut safely in his own paddock, sulking about it, and I finally ask Dawson the question I’ve been circling since the leaves started turning.
“Do you want to stay here?” I nod toward the boundary house behind us, porch catching the last of the light. “Or your own place. It’s still standing empty.”
He’s quiet a minute, reins held in one hand, tilting his hat down against the low sun so he can see me without squinting. “I asked myself that all summer. Kept thinking I owed it to some version of myself to move back into a house I built two years ago, prove I could stand on my own ground again.”
“And?”
“This is where I kissed you the first time. Where you read me passages from that book I stole from you. Where I finally told you the truth instead of another lie wearing a nicer shirt.” He looks at me, nothing left to hide behind.
“I don’t want my own ground anymore, Sage.
I want ours. This porch. This kitchen. I’ll let Tate move into my place tomorrow if you’re asking me to. ”
“I’m asking.”
“Then it’s boundary house. Our house. Forever.”
We ride the rest of the fence line in the good kind of quiet, past the turnoff where the old rail spur runs east toward the defunct Sullivan freight depot, and neither of us looks down it for long.
That’s where they found Robbie. Erin gave it up in the room with the recorder three days after the wedding, and Holt and Mackenzie drove out that same afternoon.
The depot’s been boarded up since before Dawson was born, one of the few buildings on Sullivan land older than the boundary house, and it’s where Robbie’s backup had been pointing all summer.
He went out there the night he died to see something with his own eyes.
Whoever met him made sure he never came back, and made sure nobody found him either, because a body tells you when a man died, and a time of death would have handed Dawson the alibi I’d already given him at Nell’s.
The frame only worked as long as Robbie stayed missing.
They buried him in Conrad the following Saturday, a service so small it fit in his sister’s living room.
The sister who’d almost buried him once already.
Maren, who fought to get him rehired. Mackenzie, who he’d trusted with everything.
Dawson, standing at the back the whole time, never once letting go of my hand.
His sister hugged each of us on the way out, and when she got to Dawson she held on longer than she had to and told him Robbie always said Sullivan Transport was the best job he ever had.
Somewhere past the creek crossing I catch myself thinking about the last piece of paper that tried to stand between us.
The sole liability agreement lasted eight days past our wedding.
The Bureau withdrew the planted filing that Monday, once Tate walked their federal division through Erin’s build line by line, and Foster had the rescission drawn up by Tuesday.
Dawson didn’t sign it alone at his desk.
He brought it to Sunday dinner at Sullivan Ranch and signed it at his father’s table, with Declan and Maren and all three of his brothers watching, his name going back where it belongs, beside theirs instead of in front of them.
Then he handed me the pen, and I signed under him as witness.
Maren cried. Declan pretended he didn’t. Finn fed the original through the office shredder himself and saved every strip in a mason jar that sits on the mantel in the living room now, labeled in his handwriting: NEVER AGAIN.
Dawson says it’s the only thing Finn’s ever shredded on purpose. I say it’s the best wedding gift we got.
Nell’s is packed by six, both families’ tables shoved together like they’ve started doing without anybody officially deciding to, Blackwaters and Sullivans tangled up on the same benches like the seating chart finally caught up to the marriage.
Eli’s already three beers in, needling Finn about something from the wedding footage.
Tessa’s wedged in next to me, elbow to elbow, leaning into the whole wonderful chaos of it like she’s been waiting all summer for a night like this one.
Laney and Maren have their heads bent together at the far end, Laney giggling into her water glass about some rancher from over toward Choteau she’s apparently been seeing, Maren demanding details with the focus of a woman conducting an actual interrogation.
“He’s got a name, Laney. Use it.”
“Cole,” Laney says, going pink. “His name is Cole and he has excellent hands with a rope and I refuse to be interrogated about it at dinner.”
“Cole,” Tate repeats, not looking up from his phone. “Runs about four thousand head out past Choteau. Family’s solid. I checked.”
“Nobody asked you to check, Tate.”
“Somebody should always check.”