Page 74 of Rescued By the Cowboy
“Seriously.” Ethan’s thumb traces a circle on my knee. “You okay?”
Gabriel takes a long drink. He pushes his hat back, then removes it entirely, raking a hand through his hair. I recognize this gesture. Gabriel removing his hat is like Ethan exchanging his contacts for glasses. Armor set aside.
“There’s someone,” he admits gruffly.
Everyone goes quiet. The collective pause of five couples who know what that sentence costs a Sutton man to say out loud.
“Someone,” Tom repeats, the grin gone.
“Someone I can’t get out of my head.” Gabriel’s jaw clenches. He puts the hat back on and pulls it low. “That’s all you’re getting.”
I watch the shift from teasing to recognition. Every man in this yard has worn that expression, the one that saysI’m already gone and I don’t know what to do about it.
Henry nods as if to sayI was first, and I remember.
Tom raises his glass without a word.
Angus says nothing, which, from Angus, is its own solidarity.
Daniel pulls Delaney closer and looks at his youngest brother with something between worry and hope.
Ethan’s hand tightens on my knee. I cover it with mine.
Near the equipment shed, away from the barbecue smoke and the music, a man is checking the straps on a truck bed loaded with gear.
Sullivan.
I’ve met him a handful of times at the lumberyard with Henry, and once at a perimeter check with Beckett’s veteran crew. He’s lean, quiet, and moves with the deliberate care of someone who’s learned to measure every step. A man who shows up to a gathering like this but never quite lands in it. He ate a plate of food standing up, said three words to Henry, nodded at Ethan, and drifted toward his truck like a man with an exit already planned.
Ethan follows my gaze. "He’s heading out next week. Hollow Peak. Beckett’s got a lead on Ennis up that way.”
Marlon Ennis. The bank manager who cleared out his desk the night Vance was arrested and hasn’t been seen since. The insider with a head full of LandCorp’s network and a reason to keep running.
“Is that why he’s going?”
Ethan’s thumb pauses on my knee. “That's what he told Henry.”
The way he says it tells me everything. Sullivan is going to Hollow Peak because Beckett needs eyes up there. And Sullivan is going to Hollow Peak because Sullivan needs to disappear. Both things are true.
I watch him tighten the last strap, his shoulders carrying something invisible and heavy. He doesn’t look back at the gathering or check if anyone notices him leaving.
Someone will, though. Someone always does. That’s what I've learned in this family—you think you’re slipping away unnoticed and then a hand catches your arm, or a voice saysstay, or a woman crashes into a ditch on your property and whispers your name before she opens her eyes.
Sullivan will figure that out. Not today. But eventually.
The gathering thins the way good ones do, not with goodbyes but with yawns and promises of next Saturday. Ben walks Jacob to his truck. Three months ago, that would have been a headline, but tonight, it’s simply two old men walking toward a truck.
The house settles around us as we all head to our rooms—everyone except Gabriel, who sits in the porch rocker, the ice clinking in his glass.
In the kitchen, Ethan washes, and I dry. The Tweedles are on the kitchen floor, locked in combat over a bottle cork. Crowley watches from the windowsill with the serene indifference of a cat who’s above such petty things.
My feet are bare on the worn wooden floor that terrified me the first morning I stood on it in borrowed socks, calculating how fast I could pack. Now, my toothbrush is in the holder beside Ethan’s, and my reading glasses are on the nightstand on my side of the bed. I have a side of the bed in a home I’m not leaving.
Our fingers overlap on the ceramic as Ethan hands me a wet plate. The wire ring presses between us, his calluses against my knuckles. It occurs to me that standing in a kitchen in bare feet with dishwater bubbles on my wrist and a man who washes while I dry is the most radical thing I’ve ever done. Because every morning I wake up and choose this—the man, the cats knocking pens off the table, the coffee he times without a watch—and it still feels like the bravest decision of my life.
“Good day,” my husband says.
“The best day.”
He does the face. I’m going to spend decades learning every version of that face. I can’t wait.
I take his hand. “Come to bed, cowboy.”
He follows me upstairs. We undress and climb into bed. Ethan presses his mouth against my hair as we lie in the quiet of our room, in the life we’ve built out of phone calls, crash landings, a goat that ate the evidence, and a family who showed up when it mattered.
That’s enough. That’s everything.
