Page 79 of Breaking His Exile

“I waited,” he said.

“For what?”

He looked at her. “For you.”

The words came out flat and quiet and cost him something he didn’t have a name for. He looked back at the wall after.

“I kept thinking you’d come.” His jaw was tight. “When the room cleared out. After Greta. After River and Boone and Jonah had all had their turn. I thought—” He stopped. He was doing it again. Filling space with words he hadn’t tested first. “You didn’t come. So I decided you weren’t going to.”

Rainey stared at him.

He waited for whatever came next. Irritation, maybe, or the careful distance of someone who had decided overnight that what happened on the mountain could stay on the mountain. He’d braced for it on the walk over, gone through the math of it step by step, and arrived at her door half-convinced he was walking into a clean, civil severing.

Instead she said, “Nessie showed up at seven. Then Maggie. Then Greta, and Naomi, and Mariah, and Gemma. And by the time all of them left it was eleven and Brandt was already knocking. I didn’t have a minute, Evander. Not one.”

He processed that.

She tilted her chin up slightly. “And you decided I wasn’t coming.”

“It was a reasonable assumption.”

“It was wrong.” She dropped her arms. “I was going to come the second Brandt finished. You beat me to it by—” she looked at him— “however long it took you to do whatever the hell you did to get here when you’re supposed to be horizontal and medicated.”

He said nothing.

“You thought having River and this place meant you weren’t necessary anymore.” Her voice had gone quieter, more careful. “Didn’t you.”

He didn’t answer. That was an answer.

“Gaining people doesn’t make you disposable.” She said it straight, no decoration on it. “River is River. This ranch is this ranch. You’re—” She stopped. Picked a different approach. “You’re you. Those aren’t the same space.” She looked at his face and must have found whatever she was looking for because she reached for his arm. “Come on. You’re walking back before you fall over in my doorway.”

He let her steer him into the hall because the alternative was, in fact, falling over in her doorway, and he had enough dignity left to avoid that. The hallway was quiet. Boot-scuffed floors, framed photographs he’d never looked at, the sounds of the ranch filtering through the walls — a dog, somewhere, and men’s voices out past the barn. He moved slowly and didn’t comment on the fact that her hand was under his arm and taking more of his weight than he was admitting to.

She didn’t comment either.

Back in the infirmary, he lowered himself onto the edge of the bed and breathed through his ribs resettling. Tilly was already there, having apparently followed Rainey at some point without him noticing, and the dog lifted her head from the floor and looked at him with the patient assessment of an animal that had already decided the situation was his own fault.

“Greta came to see you this morning,” Rainey said. She’d moved to the shelf and was checking the first-aid kit with no apparent reason to be checking it.

“She did.”

“Before she came to find me.”

“Probably.” He watched her. “She went both places.”

“She told me about your backcountry trips.” Her voice was still easy. Too easy. “Eight years’ worth.”

“That’s accurate.”

Rainey set a roll of bandage tape down and picked it back up again. “She told me you weren’t anything other than friends. Said it before I asked.”

“Also accurate.”

A beat.

“She probably told you before you asked,” Evander said, “because you were going to ask.”

Rainey put the tape back on the shelf. Her shoulders were very straight. “I was not.”