Chapter 29
Molly
Three months after the afternoon Boone's knife caught my side and Jolene drove me down that switchback, we sit in a courthouse that smells like floor polish and old coffee.
Today is the last of it. By the time Kendall stands to hear how many years she has lost, the others already know they are going to prison.
Kendall: eight years. She doesn't cry when the judge speaks—she just stares at Taz like she's waiting for him to save her. He keeps his hand around mine.
Boone and Jolene: prison for the kidnapping, for the plan Kendall paid them to execute. Boone stares at the floor. Jolene keeps looking toward the exit as if someone might still tell her she can go home. Neither of them can.
Jensen sits with his head bowed. He confessed to forging the paternity test, to withholding the message about my labor, to taking money for lies that nearly destroyed us.
He is going to prison too, for less time because he cooperated, and he has to repay every dollar he took.
Hudson is safe with Jensen's parents. Any visits with his parents will be supervised, if permitted.
He gets to be a baby, not the price anyone pays for this.
As Kendall is led toward the door, she twists back toward us. "He would have chosen me eventually. You know he would have."
"No, Kendall," Taz says. "I love my wife."
I stand. My voice is steady.
"You mistook hurting me for making him love you."
Kendall's face contorts, but the guard is already moving her forward.
Boone sneers until he catches Taz's expression—whatever he sees there makes him look away fast. Jolene opens her mouth as if she wants to explain again, then closes it.
There is no phone in her hand, no way to turn this into a story where I am the joke.
Outside, Taz stops on the courthouse steps. "I need you to know something."
"Okay."
"There was never a choice between you and her. I love you, Molly. I always have." He runs a hand through his hair. "But that doesn't mean I didn't hurt you all on my own. The hiding. The decisions I made without you. That was me."
"I know."
"I just needed to say it. Here. Where it's finished."
I take his hand.
We step into the daylight together. For once, I don't look back.
It's over.
That evening, we sit on Grandma June's bench at the fence line between the farm and Juniper Hill.
The sun is setting, painting the sky in oranges and pinks that look almost artificial, like someone spilled watercolors across the horizon. Clem's asleep at the ranch with Maggie. The fields lie quiet around us. The whole world feels soft and slow and safe.
"I don't want to talk about Kendall anymore tonight," I say. "I want to talk about us."
He turns toward me. "Tell me."
I pull one knee up onto the bench. "Here's the thing. I'm not angry at you anymore. I was—God, I was so angry. I thought you cheated and lied about it. That everything we had was built on nothing. But it wasn't. You didn't cheat. You didn't lie about that. You just... left."
"Molly—" he starts.
"Let me finish." I take a breath. "You left, over and over again.
Every time work called, every time the board needed you, every time there was a crisis that felt more important than me sitting at home pregnant.
You left me alone in that hospital and you left me alone in that house and you left me alone in our marriage, and I thought that meant you didn't love me anymore. "
His jaw tightens. But he doesn't interrupt.
"I don't think that now," I say. "I watched you change, Taz. You kept showing up when all I could offer was another difficult conversation. You chose us when I wasn't ready to choose you back."
"You don't have to—" he begins.
"I forgive you," I say.
The words sit between us on the bench.
He goes very still.
"Not because you suffered," I continue. "And it isn't because you proved yourself or passed some test. I forgive you because I watched you become someone different.
Someone better. Someone who actually shows up.
" I reach over, take his hand. "I want to build a new marriage with you.
I don't want to just fit into each other's lives.
Build a life together. Does that make sense? "
"Yes." His voice is rough. "God, yes, it makes sense."
I pull the papers out of my jacket pocket. My copy of the separation papers, the one my lawyer has now withdrawn, the one that's been sitting in a folder in my grandmother's farmhouse for months.
I tear it in half.
Then in quarters. Then eighths. I keep going until it's confetti in my hands, and then I tuck the scraps into my pocket.
Taz watches me. His eyes are wet.
"Molly," he says. "I need to show you something."
He reaches up, pulls at a chain around his neck that I've never noticed before, or maybe I noticed and didn't ask, didn't want to know. It's thin and silver, and hanging from the end—
My wedding ring.
The one I left on the bassinet tray the day I walked out of the hospital.
"I've been wearing it since that day," he says. "Every day. Over my heart. When I took the chain off, I kept it beside the bed. I couldn't—I couldn't let it go. Even when I thought you were never coming back. Even when I thought I'd ruined everything beyond repair."
He holds it out to me.
The ring glints in the sunset light. Small and simple, the same one he put on my finger eight years ago under Grandma June's sweet-pea arch.
I look at it.
I look at him.
"Not yet," I say.
Fear flickers across his face, or maybe hurt, and I reach out, close his fingers back around the ring.
"Ask me properly," I tell him.
The fear disappears, and hope takes its place.
"Molly Edward," he says slowly. "Will you—"
"Not here," I interrupt. "And not now. I want the whole thing. Plan it. Surprise me. Think about what our marriage actually means instead of just assuming we'll go back to what we were."
"We're not going back to what we were," he says.