Page 2 of Broken Cedar

“Okay,” I say, and it comes out steady. Small victories.

“He’s been out there since dawn.” She’s watching me now, the way she used to watch me when I was lying about where I’d been all night. Mothers. They never forget the tells. “You should go say hello.”

I should. I know I should. There are approximately seven hundred reasons why I should walk out that door, cross the yard, and face the man I’ve spent eight years pretending I don’t think about. There is exactly one reason why I shouldn’t, and it’s the same reason I booked a return flight before I’d even packed my bags: because seeing Colt again means feeling things, and feeling things means admitting I’ve been running from them, and admitting that means the entire life I’ve built starts to look like what it probably is—a very convincing substitute for the real thing.

But Mom is looking at me with those eyes, and the guilt is already here, and what’s one more helping?

“Sure,” I say weakly. “I’ll go say hi.”

I step through the door and into the mid-afternoon light. The sun is lower now, washing the yard in gold. The walk to the barn takes approximately seventeen years. Or maybe it’s forty seconds. Time gets weird when your stomach is trying to climb into your throat.

The barn smells the way it always has—hay and leather and the particular mustiness of wood that’s been standing in the same spot for a century. The back doors are open, framing a rectangle of afternoon light, and that’s where I find him.

Colt.

He’s kneeling in the dirt beside a splintered fence post, one hand braced against the wood, the other working a pry bar into the cracked base. His shirt is dark with sweat across the shoulders. His hat is pulled low, shading his face.

I stand in the doorway and watch him work, and for a few blessed seconds, I’m just a woman watching a man fix a fence. Then he looks up. His shoulders go still before his eyes find mine beneath the brim of his hat, like he felt me standing there all along.

We stare. Eight years disappear in a single heartbeat.

“Hey,” he says. His voice is low and rough and so familiar it settles somewhere beneath my ribs.

“Hey,” I manage.

“Long time,” he says.

“Yeah.”

That’s it. That’s the entire conversation. Five words total, if you count “yeah” as a word, which I do, because right now it’s carrying approximately ninety percent of the emotional payload of this interaction.

Say something. Anything. Ask about the fence. Ask about the weather. Ask if he’s seen any good movies lately. Jesus Christ—

“Fence giving you trouble?” I finally manage, and immediately want to disappear into the nearest horse stall.

He looks down at the post, then back at me. One corner of his mouth twitches into not quite a smile. “Some,” he says.

Of course. Of course he says “some.” The man could win awards for verbal economy.

I step closer, because standing in the doorway feels cowardly. Up close, he smells like sweat and cedar and something underneath that’s just him.

“You could’ve asked one of the other hands for help,” I say, nodding at the fence. Mom and Colt have close to a dozen ranch hands employed here, yet here Colt is, doing everything by himself.

“Didn’t need it.”

“You never think you need it.”

“Usually don’t.”

I almost laugh. It catches in my throat and comes out as something that might be a cough. “Stubborn.”

“Consistent,” he corrects.

He turns back to the fence post, sliding the pry bar deeper into the crack, and his forearm flexes with the effort. I have the deeply unhelpful thought that I’d like those hands on me instead.

I should go. I should say something graceful and exit stage left. Instead, I hear myself say, “Need a hand?”

He pauses, looks at me over his shoulder, and studies my face. “Could use one,” he says.