Chapter 23 Jack
Jack
I drove north without a plan beyond direction.
The miles blurred together. Small towns passed without registering—gas stations, diners, feed stores where I stopped for coffee I didn't taste and conversation I didn't remember.
Texas gave way to New Mexico, then Colorado, the landscape shifting from flat plains to rolling hills to mountains that cut against the sky like promises I wasn't sure I could keep.
Sully rode shotgun the way he always had, patient and watchful, pressing closer when I went too long without speaking. He knew something was wrong. He'd known since we left Copper Creek.
"I'm okay, Sul," I said, reaching over to rub his ears. The lie tasted familiar.
I picked up day work where I could along the way.
Fixing fence outside Amarillo for a rancher who didn't ask questions and paid in cash.
Gentling a green-broke mare near Pueblo for a woman who'd bought a horse she couldn't handle and needed someone to teach it manners.
Loading hay for a widow in Wyoming whose husband died last spring and whose sons lived too far away to help—she insisted on feeding me dinner after, pot roast and mashed potatoes that reminded me so much of my mother's cooking I had to excuse myself before the tears came.
I worked hard. Slept in my truck. Kept moving.
But none of it felt right.
Every ranch I passed through reminded me of Copper Creek. The good ones, anyway—the ones with solid fences and healthy stock and families who worked the land together. I'd see a father teaching his son to rope, or a mother calling everyone in for supper, and my chest would ache with wanting.
And Maggie. Always Maggie.
I wondered if she'd found the note yet. If she'd woken up reaching for me and found only cold sheets. If she was angry or hurt or relieved.
I wondered if she'd come after me.
I hoped she would. I was terrified she wouldn't.
The note had been a gamble. I knew that. But I also knew Maggie. Knew that if I'd stayed, if I'd given her the chance to talk me out of leaving, she would have. And nothing would have changed.
So I'd left her the choice. Come all the way, or don't come at all.
Montana pulled at me the way it always had.
I felt it before I saw it—a tightening in my chest that had nothing to do with the altitude. The landscape shifted as I crossed the border, wider skies and sharper mountains, and air that smelled like pine and snow even in autumn. Home. This land had been home once, before it became a graveyard.
I was born here. Learned to ride before I could read.
Spent summers helping my father work cattle and winters sitting by the fire while my mother read aloud from books she thought were too mature for me, and my father pretended not to notice.
My sister used to chase me through the pastures, both of us shrieking with laughter, until one of our parents called us in for dinner.
Good memories. The best memories. All of them ending in the same place.
The turnoff appeared sooner than I expected.
A narrow road I used to know by heart, now overgrown at the edges, leading toward land that belonged to strangers now. My hands tightened on the wheel. I could keep driving. I'd done it before—passed this exit a dozen times in the years since, always finding a reason to keep moving.
But something was different this time.
Maybe it was losing Maggie. Maybe it was the Blackwoods showing me what family looked like when you actually let yourself be part of one. Maybe it was Sully pressing against my leg, Brad's dog, the last living piece of a man who told me once that running from grief only makes it faster.
“You gotta face it eventually, brother,” Brad had said after my family died. “Grief's like a rip current. You fight it, it drowns you. You let it take you, you end up somewhere you can breathe again.”
I'd been fighting it for six years. Maybe it was time to stop.
I took the turn.
The road wound through country that looked exactly the same and completely different.
The fence posts my father built were gone, replaced with something newer and straighter.
The barn where I learned to gentle horses had been repainted—red instead of the weathered gray I remembered.
The house where I grew up stood in the distance, smoke rising from the chimney, a child's bicycle abandoned in the yard.
People lived there now. A family I'd never met, making memories I'd never be part of.
I didn't stop at the house. I wasn't here for that.
The cemetery was small, tucked into a grove of aspens on the edge of what used to be Remington land.
My family had been buried here for four generations—great-grandparents who homesteaded when this was still wild territory, grandparents who survived the Depression through stubbornness and luck, an uncle who died in Korea and came home in a flag-draped box.
And now my parents. My sister.
I parked at the edge of the grove and sat in the truck for a long moment, staring at the iron gate through the windshield.
My heart was pounding. My hands were shaking. I'd faced down enemy combatants in three different countries. None of it terrified me the way this quiet place full of people who loved me did.
Sully whined softly. I looked over at those steady brown eyes that had seen me through the worst moments of my life.
"Yeah," I said. "I know. Time to stop running."
I got out of the truck. Sully followed.
The gate creaked when I opened it—the same creak it had always had, the sound of every funeral I'd attended as a child, every Memorial Day when my mother brought flowers and made me help her plant them.
I walked the familiar path without looking at the stones I passed, saving my courage for the ones that mattered.
I found them at the edge of the grove, where the aspens thinned out and the view opened up to the mountains my father loved. Three headstones in a row, gray granite with simple inscriptions.
ROBERT JAMES REMINGTON Beloved Husband and Father 1963-2020
MARY CATHERINE REMINGTON Beloved Wife and Mother 1966-2020
SARAH ELIZABETH REMINGTON Beloved Daughter and Sister 2001-2020
I stood in front of them and felt the world tilt.
Six years since the plane went down. I was in Afghanistan when the notification came.
I'd just finished a mission that cost two men their lives—good men, brothers, friends who'd trusted me to bring them home.
I was sitting in the dirt outside a bombed-out building, still covered in dust and someone else's blood, when my commanding officer found me with the news that my entire family was gone.
I didn't cry then.
I haven't cried since.
Somewhere along the way, I'd decided that grief was a luxury I couldn't afford.
That if I let myself feel the full weight of what I'd lost, it would crush me.
So I locked it away. Sold the ranch. Took Brad's dog when Brad didn't come home.
And started drifting, always moving, never staying long enough for the grief to catch up.
It caught up anyway. It always does.
I sank to my knees in front of my mother's grave, and six years of carefully contained sorrow broke open like a dam.
I cried the way I couldn't at the funeral—ugly, gasping sobs that shook my whole body and didn't care who heard them. The sound was terrible, inhuman almost, the sound of something breaking that had been held together too long by will alone.
I cried for my mother, who taught me to be gentle with horses and firm with myself, who baked cookies that always came out slightly burnt and pretended that was intentional.
She'd written me letters every week while I was deployed—long, chatty letters full of ranch gossip and small-town drama and thinly veiled hints about nice girls she knew who were single.
I'd kept every one of them in a shoebox under my bunk, reading them over and over until the paper went soft.
They were all I had left of her voice now.
I cried for my father, who showed me what it meant to love a woman well and work land that mattered, who could fix anything with baling wire and determination.
He'd taught me to ride when I was four, holding me steady on the saddle until I found my balance.
He'd taught me that a man's worth wasn't measured by what he had but by what he did with it.
I cried for my sister, who had just started her second semester of college.
She was going to be a veterinarian. She wrote me letters about her classes, about missing home, and complaining about her roommate.
At the time, I’d wished she’d written me something real, but now, I’d give anything to see her swirling handwriting whining about snoring and laundry scattered everywhere.
I cried for the life I should have had. The Sunday dinners and Christmas mornings and ordinary Tuesday evenings that were stolen from me while I was half a world away.
I should have been here. Should have protected them.
Should have been on that plane with them, or talked them out of going, or done something—anything—to keep them safe.
Sully pressed against me, warm and solid, and I wrapped an arm around the dog's neck and held on.
"I'm sorry," I whispered to the stones. "I'm sorry I wasn't here. I'm sorry I couldn't save you. I'm sorry it took me so long to come back."
The aspens rustled overhead, their leaves gold and trembling in the autumn breeze. The mountains stood silent in the distance, patient and eternal. And I knelt in the grass where my family was buried and finally—finally—let myself grieve.
I didn't know how long I stayed there.
Long enough for the sun to shift, for the shadows to lengthen, for my tears to run dry and leave me hollowed out but somehow lighter.
When I finally lifted my head, the world looked different.
Clearer. Like I'd been seeing it through smudged glass for twelve years and someone had finally wiped it clean.
I stood slowly, my knees aching from the cold ground.
"I met someone," I said quietly. The words felt strange—talking to headstones, talking to ghosts—but also right. Like they could hear me. Like they'd been waiting.
"Her name is Maggie. You would have loved her, Mom—she's fierce and funny, and she doesn't take any shit from anyone.
She runs her family's ranch like a general commanding an army, and underneath all that competence she's got a heart bigger than she wants anyone to know.
" I almost smiled. "Dad, you would have given me hell about her.
Told me I was punching above my weight. Said I'd better work twice as hard to deserve her. "
I looked at my sister's headstone. Sarah. Nineteen years old forever.
"Sarah, you would have stolen her away and made her your new best friend within five minutes. You would have told her all my embarrassing childhood stories and ganged up on me and laughed at my expense." My voice cracked. "You would have been her maid of honor. If we got that far. If she—"
I stopped. Swallowed hard.
"I left her. Not because I don't love her—I love her more than I've ever loved anyone.
But she's scared, and I can't make her brave.
She has to choose that for herself." I looked at my parents' headstones, side by side, the way they were in life.
"You taught me that, Dad. You said real love doesn't shrink to fit someone else's fear.
It stands steady and waits for them to rise. "
The wind picked up, rustling through the aspens. I could swear I heard my mother's voice in the sound—soft, warm, the way she used to hum while she cooked.
"I think I'm going to buy some land," I continued. "Not here—the ranch is gone, and that's okay. It belongs to someone else now. But there's a place in Texas, near her family. Good soil. Good water. Room for horses." I almost smiled. "Room for a future, if she wants one with me."
Sully sat at my feet, watching me with patient eyes. Brad's dog. My dog now.
"I'm going to be okay," I said—to the dog, to the graves, to myself. "Whatever happens. I'm going to be okay."
I believed it. For the first time in twelve years, I actually believed it.
I knelt one more time, pressing my palm flat against my mother's headstone. The granite was cold beneath my hand, but I swore I could feel warmth underneath—the echo of a woman who loved me unconditionally, who would have told me to stop running and start living.
"I love you," I said. "All of you. I'll come back. I promise."
Then I stood, called Sully to my side, and walked out of the cemetery.
The sun was setting by the time I reached my truck, painting the mountains gold and crimson.
I leaned against the hood and watched the light fade, feeling emptied out and filled up at the same time.
The grief wasn't gone—it never would be.
But it was different now. Integrated. Part of me, instead of something I was running from.
I thought about the inheritance sitting in an account I'd never touched—money that had felt cursed, earned from loss, waiting for a purpose that finally made sense.
Home wasn't a place. I understood that now. Home was people. Home was family—the one you were born into and the one you chose.
And if Maggie came for me—if she was brave enough to choose me the way I'd chosen her—I'd spend the rest of my life making sure she never regretted it.
I got in the truck, Sully settling into the passenger seat beside me. For the first time since I left Copper Creek, I wasn't running.
I was waiting.
Somewhere behind me, in Texas, Maggie was either packing a bag or building her walls higher. I didn't know which. I could only hope she'd choose the bag. That she'd choose me.
I'd be ready when she did.