Page 120 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
I still mean it.
Grace
She folded the note once, creased it with her thumbnail the way Mama used to crease the letters she sent back to the old country, and left it propped against the salt cellar in the center of the table where Logan would find it first thing, because that man salted his eggs before he even cooked them, which had driven her crazy the first week and now—
Right.
She laced her boots tight, double knots, the way she’d done at the fair after Logan told her to, and pulled on her coat. The fifty dollars went into the inside pocket, right against her ribs. Mormor’s wooden rose brooch sat on the hallway shelf. She pinned it to the inside of her collar, where it pressed against her throat, because her grandmother had carried that brooch across an ocean sewn into the hem of her dress, and Grace needed that kind of courage pressed against her skin tonight.
The front door opened without a sound. Logan had oiled the hinges last week, because of course he had, and Grace stepped through into the cold night air and pulled the door shut behind her.
The road stretched out toward town in the moonlight, pale dirt and dark fence posts, and the cottonwood tree standing like a crooked finger against the sky. Three miles, maybe four. She’d walked it once before, the day she’d arrived, with a popped blister and seventeen cents and a burning in her chest so hot it had carried her all the way to the gate.
Lord only knew where the bandits were hiding, but, if they had as much of a lookout on the house as Jonah had said, someone would notice her walking sooner or later.
Someone would come get her and take her to Ace.
The gravel crunched under her boots. Somewhere behind her, Gerald shifted on his perch and let out one low, questioning cluck.
“Mind your business, Gerald.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Logan stood at the top of the stairs with his hand on the banister and his ledger tucked under one arm. He should’ve gone to bed twenty minutes ago, except Grace’s and Jonah’s voices carried up through the floorboards from the back of the house.
You used me.
That landed differently from up here. From the yard, with trenches dug in his property and blood on Jonah’s face, it would’ve sounded like an accusation, like Grace turning on her brother the way Logan had turned on both of them.
But from the top of the stairs, alone, with nothing between him and the words but pine floorboards and plaster, it sounded like a woman whose heart had just gotten kicked out of her chest.
I didn’t know about the ad. Lord as my witness.
She’d said it in the yard. Jonah had backed it up. And Logan had looked right through both of them because the anger had needed somewhere to go, and Grace had been standing closest and—
Right.
He sat down on the top step. Put the ledger beside him. The numbers could wait. The numbers would still be terrible in the morning, and terrible numbers had never once improved just because he stared at them.
Below, Grace’s voice went thick and wet, like someone crying while trying real hard to talk through it, and the words came up through the floor in pieces.He’ll never trust me again.Then something about the letter. Something about every goddamn word.
Logan leaned his head against the banister post.
He’d read that letter a dozen times since Mason first slid it across the table, and every line of it—the plain food, the mending, the promise to make a home and not just keep a house—every line had Grace’s fingerprints all over it.
Not Ace Pike’s. Not Jonah’s. Grace’s. The woman who talked to tomato plants and threw buckets at gophers.
The crying got quieter. Voices dropped to murmurs he couldn’t make out, and then boots on dirt, and then just the crickets and the house settling the way it did every night, all those joists and beams adjusting to the temperature, which Logan usually found comforting but right now found—
He’d tell her in the morning. First thing. Before the coffee, before the eggs, before she salted the cast iron the wrong way—she always salted it wrong, too much on the left side, and—
In the morning. He’d sit her down and tell her he’d acted like a jackass and that the letter had always been hers and he’d never doubted that, not really, not in the part of him that mattered.
He picked up the ledger and went to bed.
***
Miriam’s scream cut through the dark like a blade on a whetstone.
