Chapter 41
Forty-One
Tessa
The apartment lights were off, the curtains half open.
Late afternoon sun poured in and painted long stripes across the floor.
Everything looked exactly the same as the day I left, but it didn’t feel like the same place.
The couch, the throw blanket, the coffee table with its chipped corner.
The little plant on the window ledge that should’ve been dead but stubbornly wasn’t.
A stack of library books that Dani never returned.
Time moved without me. That was the strangest part.
Dani came out of her bedroom and froze when she saw me standing in the kitchen. “You’re home.” She blinked a few times, making sure I was real, and waited.
I tried to breathe, I pulled air in, felt it scrape down my throat, felt it catch in my chest, and then it came out in a shudder that made my knees wobble.
The sound I made wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even dignified. It was the kind of noise that came from somewhere deep, the kind you didn’t choose. My vision blurred immediately. My skin went hot, then cold.
Dani was on me in a second.
Her arms wrapped around my ribs, tight and fierce, and it should’ve made me feel held. It did, and it didn’t. Because the second she touched me, every single thing I’d been bracing against snapped at once.
I folded into her, face pressed against her shoulder, and my body started shaking so hard my teeth clicked.
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say, the words tumbling out broken. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Dani demanded, voice thick. “For surviving. For coming home. For not being dead. Shut up.”
I tried to shut up. I tried to swallow it back down. But my chest heaved, and my hands fisted in her shirt like I needed something solid to keep me from floating away.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, and the anger in her voice was aimed at the universe, not me. “You didn’t. You did what you had to do.”
I wanted to believe her.
The problem was, my body didn’t.
My body still remembered the truck, the smell of cologne that didn’t belong, the way my stomach had dropped so hard I thought I might throw up.
My body remembered the way my own voice had sounded when I tried to bargain like a frightened animal.
It remembered the cabin walls breathing in the wind.
It remembered the way relief could feel like nausea when it came too fast.
And now, standing in my apartment, I felt the same thing again. Relief, nausea, grief. All tangled together until I couldn’t tell one from another.
Dani guided me toward the couch, hands steady on my shoulders. “Sit,” she said.
I sat because I didn’t trust my legs.
The cushions dipped under me, and it hit wrong, that softness. The ranch had hard edges. Wood and metal and dust. Survival. Out there, everything was sharp enough to cut. Here it was all upholstery and quiet, and my body didn’t know what to do with that.
Dani crouched in front of me, elbows on her knees, eyes level with mine. Her eyeliner had smudged a little. She looked tired. She looked older, somehow. Not in a way that made her less Dani, but in a way that said she’d been holding too much too.
“Do you want water?” she asked. “Tea. Food. Do you want me to put you in the shower?”
A wet laugh jerked out of me and turned immediately into a sob. My hand flew to my mouth like I could catch it.
Dani’s face cracked. “Oh, babe.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what I want.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I know what you need.”
She stood and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the tap run. A glass clink. Cabinet doors opening and closing. The ordinary sounds of living, the kind that used to comfort me. Now they felt like they belonged to someone else’s life.
My gaze drifted to the window. Calgary sprawled beyond it, all glass and steel and traffic sliding along like veins full of light.
Somewhere down on the street, a car horn blared.
Someone laughed. A siren rose and faded.
The city didn’t pause to ask if I’d been okay out there.
It didn’t care that I’d left a piece of myself in a valley.
My phone sat in my pocket like a stone.
I hadn’t turned it on yet.
I didn’t have the courage to see what was waiting.
Dani returned with a glass of water and two Advil on her palm like an offering. “Drink,” she ordered, voice gentle but unarguable.
I took the pills, swallowed them dry because my hands were shaking too hard to lift the glass. Dani held the water to my mouth like I was sick. I hated it. I clung to it.
The water tasted like home and guilt.
When she set the glass down, she sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. Her knee bumped mine lightly, a silent reminder that I wasn’t alone even if my brain kept trying to convince me otherwise.
“So,” she said softly. “Talk to me.”
My throat tightened. I stared at my hands in my lap, at the faint dirt still under my nails that I couldn’t quite scrub out. Proof. Residue. A little piece of the place I’d left.
“I left,” I whispered. She went quiet. Her hand slid over mine. Warm. Steady.
“I signed the letter of offer Wyatt had given Ray,” I admitted. “I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anyone. I just did it.”
Dani’s fingers tightened around mine. “Tess.”
“I couldn’t stay,” I said, and the words rushed out before I could stop them.
“I couldn’t breathe there anymore. Every time I opened a drawer, it was Ray.
Every time I turned around, it was the debt.
Every time I looked up, there was that valley and those fences and that stupid, stubborn land staring back at me like it was daring me to fail.
And I kept thinking about the cabin and how small that space felt, and then I’d walk into my own kitchen, and it felt just as small.
Like I traded one kind of trap for another. ”
My voice cracked. I swallowed hard.
Dani’s eyes shone. “You’re not trapped here.”
“I know,” I said, but I didn’t sound like I believed myself.
My body was still braced for something to happen. For a door to slam. For a voice to rise. For a demand. For control disguised as care.
Instead, there was only Dani, breathing beside me.
I pressed my fingertips into my thigh hard enough to hurt, grounding myself in pain because it was easier than drowning in the soft.
“I keep thinking,” I said, and my voice dropped. “I keep thinking he’s going to show up. I keep listening for footsteps in the hall.”
Dani’s face went pale. “Colin.”
I nodded.
“I hate that he’s still in my head,” I whispered. “I hate that I’m here and I still feel like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Dani’s jaw clenched. “He’s not coming back.”
“You don’t know that,” I said, and the fear in my voice embarrassed me immediately. “I don’t know where he is.”
Dani’s hand slid to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair. “I know,” she said. “I know. But he’s been dealt with. You’re safe. You’re here. You’ve got me, and you’ve got locks, and you’ve got a building full of nosy neighbours who’d love a reason to call the cops.”
I tried to smile. It didn’t work.
Dani leaned her head against mine. “You’re not alone,” she murmured.
The words hit a place in me that was still bruised.
I swallowed hard. “I left him there, without a goodbye.”
Dani didn’t ask who. She didn’t need to.
Wyatt.
The name sat between my ribs like a live thing.
I could still feel the weight of his hand on my knee in the truck, the way it steadied me without asking permission.
I could still hear his voice when he said easy, like he was talking to a horse spooked by thunder.
I could still remember the scrape on his knuckle, the dirt on his jaw, the way he’d sat on my floor like sleep was optional if it meant I kept breathing.
And then, days later, in the brewery, like he’d been starving and trying not to show it.
The way my body had lit up, furious and relieved and alive all at once.
The way I clung to him because I wanted to feel normal, and the only normal I could find was heat and hands and the illusion that nothing could touch me while he was there.
I told him I needed space.
Not because I’d stopped wanting him.
Because I’d wanted him too much.
Because wanting him felt like losing control, and control was the only thing I had left.
Dani shifted beside me. “You’re thinking about him.”
I flinched. “Don’t.”
She sighed softly. “I’m not going to tease you. I’m not going to make a joke. I’m not even going to call him Cowboy Daddy, even though it brings me joy.”
A broken laugh escaped me despite everything. It sounded ugly.
Dani smiled faintly, then it fell away just as quickly. “Tess.”
I swallowed. “I shouldn’t have… done that.”
“Had sex,” Dani said, blunt but gentle.
My face heated. “Don’t say it like that.”
“How should I say it?” she asked quietly. “You clung to someone who made you feel safe.”
I stared at the window because looking at her felt too intimate. “I didn’t want it to mean anything.”
“And it did,” she said, not cruel, just honest.
My chest tightened. I pressed my palm to my sternum, as if I could hold my heart still.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t fall apart and also have him. I can’t be the woman with a ranch drowning in debt and the woman who wants him.”
My throat burned. Tears rose fast, hot and humiliating. “I’m a coward,” I whispered.
Dani’s hand tightened around mine. “You’re a human being.”
I sucked in a breath, and my lungs trembled. “I keep seeing his face when he realizes.”
Dani’s mouth tightened. “He’ll be mad.”
“He’ll hate me,” I whispered.
Dani turned fully toward me. “He won’t hate you.”
I laughed, sharp and raw. “You don’t know him.”
“I know you,” she said. “And nobody can hate you.”
That cracked something.
The sob came out of me hard. My shoulders shook. My stomach clenched like it was trying to fold me in half.
Dani pulled me into her arms, and I let her, because I couldn’t hold myself together anymore.
“I wanted to stay,” I choked out against her shoulder. “I wanted to fight. I wanted to be the woman who could handle it. I wanted to be the one who came home and fixed everything and proved I wasn’t just some city girl. I wanted to be strong.”
Dani’s hand moved up and down my back, slow and steady. “You are strong.”
“No,” I said, and it came out viciously, because the word felt like a lie people told to make themselves comfortable.
“Strong would’ve been staying and doing the work.
I would've faced it and not panicked. Strong would’ve been calling the lawyer, making a plan, and sitting in that county office until they gave me answers.
Strong would’ve been not letting Colin get under my skin again.
Being strong would’ve been not needing Wyatt like a life raft. ”
Dani held me tighter. “Stop.”
I pulled back just enough to look at her, eyes burning. “I don’t want to be someone who needs saving.”
Dani’s eyes were wet. “Nobody wants that. But sometimes you do, and that doesn’t make you weak. It makes you alive.”
I shook my head hard, tears flying. “I hate that I left Ray. He was my dad, Dani, and I never knew.”
Dani’s face softened as the words drained out of me.
My father was gone. His ranch was gone now, too. The valley was still out there under that huge sky, and I was here in a condo with beige carpet and city noise and a glass of water on a coffee table. It didn’t add up. It didn’t feel real.
Dani brushed my hair back from my forehead, gently. “Do you want to sleep?”
I swallowed. “I don’t think I can.”
“You can,” she insisted. “I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
The promise hit a place that was still raw from being taken. From being trapped. From having my choices ripped away, and then having to make another choice that felt just as brutal.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
Dani’s voice broke. “I know.”
“I’m scared that if I close my eyes, I’ll hear him,” I admitted, shame burning in my cheeks. “I’ll hear the cabin. I’ll hear the door. I’ll hear his voice telling me I’m choosing to stay, like I wanted any of it.”
Dani’s arms tightened around me until it almost hurt. “Listen to me. You’re safe. If you hear anything in this hallway, it’ll be Mrs. Bellows from 4B taking her recycling out and judging everyone’s life choices.”
I managed a wet, ugly laugh.
Dani kissed the side of my head. “That’s my girl.”
I closed my eyes for a second and tried to breathe.
My phone still sat heavy in my pocket.
I couldn’t ignore it forever.
After a minute, I pulled it out and stared at the dark screen.
Dani watched me carefully. “You don’t have to turn it on right now.”
“I do,” I whispered. “If I don’t, I’ll imagine the worst.”
My thumb hovered.
The second the screen lit, notifications stacked like a punch.
Missed calls. Messages. Voicemails. Numbers I recognized. And then the name that made my stomach flip.
Wyatt.
There were too many.
I stared until my vision blurred.
Dani leaned closer, voice soft. “What is it?”
“I can’t,” I whispered.
Dani’s hand covered mine, warm and steady. “You don’t have to answer him.”
“I should,” I said, and the guilt hit so hard it felt like nausea.
Dani didn’t argue. She just stayed close.
I opened the most recent message.
It wasn’t long.
Wyatt: Where are you?
Wyatt: Tessa, answer me.
Wyatt: Please.
That one hit different. That one didn’t sound like anger. It sounded like a man with a fist around his own throat, trying to keep himself from begging.
I pressed my knuckles to my mouth, hard.
“I miss him,” I whispered, and the words fell out like a prayer. “I miss him so much I feel sick.”
Dani’s eyes filled again. “Oh, babe.” She wrapped her arms around me again, and this time, I let myself collapse fully. I let the sobs come. I let them tear through my chest and shake my shoulders and leave me raw.
I cried until my throat hurt and my eyes swelled and my skin felt too tight, until I couldn’t remember what I’d been holding back anymore.
I cried for Ray. I cried for the ranch. I cried for myself, the version of me that went back to that valley and thought she could be brave enough to carry it all.
I cried for the fact that the only man who’d made me feel safe in weeks was the same man I’d pushed away.
Dani held me through it all, rocking slightly, murmuring nonsense and comfort and curses at the universe.
When the sobs finally eased into hiccupping breaths, I wiped my face on my sleeve and stared at the ceiling like it might give me answers.
Dani’s voice was barely a whisper. “You’re going to get through this.”