Page 46 of The Lonely Road

Her gaze flicks at me, then at the truck, and then back at me.

“Nice threads!” There’s a teasing quality to her voice. “A little excessive for the Horseshoe, don’t you think?”

“Damn!” I play along. “I was thinking of going there, but you’re too beautiful for a local diner.”

“Smooth,” she murmurs, then steps away from the door and gestures for me to step inside. “Where are we going?”

I stay outside her door, knowing that if I cross this threshold, there’s no clean way back.

“Atelier Noir,” I tell her, buying time. “It’s in⁠—”

“Marble,” she finishes excitedly, and I know I made the right choice. “I’ve been wanting to go there ever since I heard about it.”

“Come in,” she urges softly. “I just need to get my coat.”

Stop being a putz, Brooks, and go into her house. You’re going to have to, eventually, whether she invites you or not.

Breaking and entering into her office felt wrong, so I wonder if I’ll be able to rummage through her house as I would anyone else’s when I’m working, looking for something my mark is hiding.

I walk into her living room just as she disappears deeper into the house, out of my line of sight.

It’s open-plan and renovated—modern yet warm. The coziness, however, isn’t architectural; it’s her.

There’s a deep-seated sofa in cognac leather, worn to the softness of something loved rather than maintained, piled with blankets in jewel tones I’ve come to associate with her—turquoise, rust, cream.

A Navajo-style rug anchors the sitting area, geometric and bold. It’s the kind of thing you buy because it moves you, not because it matches.

The art is Aspen money and Ignacio’s soul in equal measure.

A large abstract canvas above the fireplace—all ochre and burnt sienna and the deep blue-gray of mountain shadows. Beside it, smaller, a framed print of a canyon landscape. On the far wall, a series of three photographs—black and white, large format, stark, precise landscape photography.

The fireplace is river stone.

The mantel holds three things: a small, unglazed clay pot, a legal mystery paperback, and a photograph in a plain frame—two women, one young, one old, squinting into the same sun—her grandmother and her.

There are books everywhere—stacked on the coffee table, doubled up on the shelves flanking the fireplace, a paperback face-down on the arm of the sofa where she left it mid-read. Law books and novels, and what looks like a well-used field guide to Colorado wildflowers, with its spine broken.

This is the home of a woman who left a glass building in Aspen, brought the best parts of that life with her, and set them beside the parts that were always hers—and somehow, the two coexist.

I stand in the middle of it and feel, with a clarity that is becoming harder to argue with, that I have no business being here. Not because I wasn’t invited—but because I don’t deserve the trust that invitation represents.

I’m about to step back outside the cottage and wait by the truck when some beadwork by the kitchen catches my eye.

I move toward it without quite deciding to.

“That’s a pipe bag,” Taya says, from behind me.

I turn. She’s put on a cashmere coat—Max Mara, if I’m not wrong. The bag she’s carrying is Furla. I guess she used to have a designer habit.

“What’s a pipe bag?”

She tilts her head. “A bag that holds a pipe.”

I laugh at myself. “Right.”

“This one is old.” She comes to stand beside me, looking at it the way you look at something you’ve looked at your whole life and still find worth looking at. “My grandmother gave it to me. Her grandmother gave it to her.” She pauses. “It’s brain-tanned mule deer hide. The beadwork is traditional Ute—those are our sacred colors. Blue for fire, yellow for fire in another aspect, green for the earth.”

I want to put my hands on it, feel it.