Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
We napped, and when I woke up a few hours later, Brody was gone. So, there was no titty fucking either, which was a damn shame.
It was fine. I was fine. I didn't need to wake up with him.
But it was nice.
Seemed everything was goddamn nice these days.
Gag.
The way I'd ignored my bladder earlier came back to bite me in the ass, because I damn near pissed my… skin tryin' to get to the bathroom. Tripped over Cat curled up in a sheet we must have ditched sometime during our nap.
She clearly didn't like her bed.
Or, maybe, it would grow on her.
Like mold.
I sat on the toilet, smiling like a damn fool. Couldn't remember the last time I smiled so much. Or laughed. Or just simply relaxed.
It was real, real nice.
A shower had me feeling marginally more human, which was about all I could ask for given the state of things.
I toweled off, pulled on clothes, and padded downstairs to find Cat sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, staring at me like I was already late.
"Good morning to you, too," I said.
She meowed once and walked to her Princess bowl.
I fed her, then stood at the counter drinking the coffee Brody had left—still warm, which meant he hadn't been gone long—while she ate with the single-minded devotion of a creature who had never once questioned whether she deserved good things.
Just assumed it. Showed up and expected to be fed and held and loved and took it as her due when she was.
I watched her and thought that was probably the healthiest psychology I'd ever encountered.
When she finished, she sat back, licked one paw with great dignity, and looked at me.
I crouched down and she walked straight into my hands, purring before I'd even gotten a proper grip.
I sat there on the kitchen floor for a minute, just holding her against my chest, her small warm weight settling into me the way it always did—like she'd decided I was hers and that was simply that. No negotiation required.
I pressed my lips to the top of her tiny head.
Nobody was watching.
When I finally stood and set her down, I looked around the quiet kitchen. No work today. No Brody. No Sassy texting to make plans. Just me and the pesky thing I'd been putting off for two months now.
I grabbed my keys.
Forty minutes south on Route 89, just outside Livingston. I'd looked it up so many times, the address had lodged itself somewhere behind my eyes whether I wanted it there or not. Pulled it up again anyway at the first stop sign, like maybe it had changed.
It hadn't.
The mountains in my rearview gave way to the Absarokas range as I drove, the landscape shifting and opening up in that particular Montana way that made you feel very small and not entirely bad about it. I'd been trying not to notice things like that for two months. Mostly failing.
The radio played something I didn't register. I turned it off.
The last few miles I drove in silence, watching the flat sprawl of Livingston come into view. A twinge tightened in my chest the closer I got.
I'd told myself I was waiting for the right moment. Then I'd told myself I was too busy. Then I'd told myself he probably didn't remember me anyway.
I pulled up to the assisted living facility just after noon.
By one, I'd managed to park and turn the truck off, but I hadn't moved an inch.
The facility was nicer than I'd expected. Low building. Well-kept flower beds along the front walk that somebody clearly tended with care. A few residents in the garden off to the side, one in a wide-brimmed hat moving slow between the raised beds. Normal. Peaceful, even.
I stared at the front entrance and felt absolutely nothing that resembled the ability to walk through it.
The thing was, I didn't know what I was walking into.
Didn't know if he'd know my name or my face or anything about me at all.
Didn't know if he'd be sharp or gone or somewhere in between.
Didn't know if he'd want to see me, or if showing up after all this time—after his daughter died and his granddaughter disappeared into two decades of nowhere—would read as cruelty dressed up as a visit.
Didn't know if I was here for him or for me or for my mama or for some version of myself that was twelve years old and standing in the center of that paddock watching her whole world come apart.
The man in the front office wouldn't know any of that. He'd just see a woman who'd filled out a visitor form online and shown up on a Saturday in July.
I could do that.
I could just be that.
I put my hand on the car door handle.
Took it off again.
A family came out through the front entrance—mom, dad, two kids, grandma moving slow between them with a walker, everyone laughing at something.
The little girl ran ahead and held the door and the grandma said something that made the whole group laugh again.
They loaded into a minivan and were gone in under two minutes.
I watched the whole thing from behind my windshield like it was a nature documentary.
My phone was in my hand before I'd made a conscious decision about it.
It rang twice.
"Hey—"
"I'm in a parking lot in Livingston and I can't get out of my truck." I said it fast, before I could talk myself out of saying it at all. "I came to see my granddad and I've been sitting here for an hour and I can't—" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. "I don't know why I called you."
A beat of silence.
"What's the address?"
"Brody, you don't have to—"
"Calvin." His voice was easy. Unhurried. Like a man who had exactly nowhere else he needed to be. "What's the address?"
I recited it from memory.
There was a beat of silence that told me he clocked that, and was kind enough not to say so.
"I'll be there in forty-five minutes," he said. "Don't go anywhere."
"I wasn't planning on it," I muttered.
He laughed softly and hung up.
I set my phone on the passenger seat and looked back at the front entrance. I reclined my seat two inches.
Closed my eyes.
Wyatt Cole was coming to Meagher County in two weeks.
My grandfather was forty feet away.
Brody Lancaster was forty-five minutes out.
I had no idea what I was doing.
But he was coming anyway, and I'd stopped arguing with myself about what that meant because it made the forty feet feel a little more like something I might be able to cross.
Just not until he was here.