Page 28 of The Lonely Road

Now, I’m amused, on top of being disgusted. “Buddy, there is no us.”

“Baby….”

This man has some balls on him. He took my career away from me because his wife asked him to, making it a condition for reconciliation. I had to be gone so he wouldn’t be tempted. Well, she obviously doesn’t know her husband well enough.

“Griffin, if this isn’t about my bonus check, I’m going to hang up.” My voice is even, and I don’t even have to put any effort into it.

Maybe this is the victory.

“That was—” He stops. Starts again. “I handled it badly.”

Handled it badly?

Is that what he calls it? The future I’d built in my head—a floor I thought I was standing on—gone one morning, and I’m supposed to act like I’d known all along it wasn’t load-bearing.

Suddenly, I know something.

An epiphany.

It wasn’t the relationship that broke me. I could survive the relationship. It was that I didn’t see it coming.

Me—a woman who cross-examines witnesses for a living, who finds the gap in every argument, the crack in every foundation, didn’t expect the blow.

I had looked at Griffin Cole with the full force of my professional intelligence and seen exactly what he wanted me to see. I let that be enough—and the failure of that tool, the one I trust most, is what still rankles.

“I handled it badly,” he says again, like the repetition makes it more effective—maybe even sufficient.

“Yes,” I agree. “You did.”

“I want to make it right.”

I burst out laughing. “Send me my money, Griffin, and don’t call again. If you do, I’ll tell your wife.”

I hang up, feeling rather good about myself.

CHAPTER 7

mason

Feig drives like a man who has somewhere to be and hasn’t accepted that he might not get there on time—it’s a kind of optimism I’ve noticed is general to him.

He talks the entire thirty minutes.

I let him.

“Biggest social event of the calendar outside of the Fourth of July,” he says, for the second time since we left the inn. “Every rancher in the valley will be there. Mav buys every year. Duke shows up. Cade Mercer bought a steer last year—changed his life.”

I raise an eyebrow.

He guffaws. “The steer had health issues. Now he’s married to the vet.”

Dr. Sarah Kirk. In the file.

My gaze drifts to the window.

The road runs south along the valley floor, mountains on either side, the creek catching light in flashes through the cottonwoods.

I wonder, without meaning to, if Taya is somewhere out there. She said she was busy this weekend, but not with what.