Page 165 of The Lonely Road

“And just like that, it’ll be okay? I don’t believe that.”

She nods slowly, as if considering her response. “It’s hard at first. It’s supposed to be.”

“Duke and I had….” She sighs. “There was a time when I didn’t know if we were going to be us. If we were going to survive what we needed to survive.” She focuses on her tea. “And then we did. And what was on the other side was better than what was before, because what was before didn’t know what we were going to be.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Plain English, please.”

She laughs. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just telling you what the other side looks like.”

“What does it look like?”

She puts her hand on her stomach again, that small unconscious gesture. “It looks like this, Taya.” Her eyes shine with happy tears.

Before I can conjure up the dream of being with Mason so completely that we make a family, Joy kicks the music up—the kind you dance to when no one’s watching, and because life is genuinely better when you do.

We start with Single Ladies because that’s how you start, whether you’re single or not. And evolve all the way to Paris Paloma’s anthem, Labor, which we all sing to in loud and off-key voices.

I am drunk.

Not obliterated—I’m still myself, still Taya, still aware of the hurt I carry. But the edges have softened.

And I am dancing barefoot in Joy and Aria’s home with women I have known for less than a year.

I know my grandmother would look at this room and know exactly what it was.

You’ll always have a home, my girl, if you let people be your home.

I know, Wíitsin. I know.

So we dance—with total commitment, zero self-consciousness, and without a care in the world.

This is the gift of it. The not caring. The room that holds you when you’re too tired to hold yourself.

CHAPTER 40

mason

The Barrel & Bridle is not a bar you choose, at least the first time.

You end up there—following someone who knows someone, or taking a wrong turn off Main Street, or, in my case, getting a text from Kaz: Poker. B&B. 7 p.m.

The Barrel & Bridle has been here since before Wildflower Canyon had paved roads and shows no evidence of updating its ambitions.

The floor is wood, so old it’s soft underfoot. The bar is long and scarred and the kind of clean that comes from thirty years of wiping the same surface rather than any recent effort.

The smell is beer and fryer oil and the ghost of cigarettes that lives in the walls long after the smoking stops. There’s a jukebox in the corner that leans toward Waylon Jennings.

God help us all!

Ranch hands fill most of the seats. Men who have been doing physical work since before daylight and have earned the right to be loud about it. Nobody is using an inside voice. Nobody gives a shit what you think of them.

I feel, unexpectedly, at home.

There are two places you can go to if you want to play poker in Wildflower Canyon, and that’s two more such places than I know of in New York.

There’s The Blazing Saddles, a titty bar where I haven’t been, and the B&B that has its own version of a speakeasy-style gambling den that everyone knows about, but no one does anything about.

The back room has a table, six chairs, and a single overhead light.