Page 84 of The Lonely Road

“Am I?”

“You never smile like that.”

“Like what?”

She studies me for a moment, the way she studies things she’s decided to keep. “Like you forgot to decide not to.”

The round ends. The Catman signals. The couples separate.

She steps back. Takes the shawl with her. Returns to the women’s line without looking back, though she doesn’t need to.

I step out of the men’s line and find Daniel.

“My man,” he says, with the quiet appreciation of someone who has witnessed something. “You’re done.”

Tell me something I don’t know!

The pattern continues: the call, the choosing, the meeting in the middle, the return. Over and over. Not building. Not resolving. Just continuing, the way the drum continues, the way the moraches continue, the way the ceremony has always continued, whether anyone was watching or not.

I stand at the edge of the grounds with the coffee Auntie Carol put in my hand without asking, and I watch Taya Morningstar move in a world that has nothing to do with me. The humidity and the dancing have pulled some fly-aways loose around her face. Her face is open, and I’m aware that the version of her who operates in Wildflower Canyon is not here.

What’s here is older than that.

It’s rooted.

It’s not longing or even admiration—it’s larger than that. It’s watching a person be completely, uncomplicatedly themselves in a context that has nothing to do with you and realizing, in that moment, that you love them. It is not the version of love built around what they give you—it’s the one where you want them to have this world, these people, this slant of May light—forever, whether you’re part of it or not.

And underneath it, there is a quiet certainty: I don’t deserve to be here.

The feeling is an honest inventory of a man who has been standing in borrowed space and who has just watched the woman he was paid to destroy step into the center of the thing she comes from and move like someone who has never once had to question where she belongs.

The drums keep going.

So does the damage I’m going to have to find a way to name.

CHAPTER 20

taya

They like him. Sienna. Auntie Carol. Elder Nokoni. Even Cam. They all like him.

And I am proud that they do. This is my man. I brought him here, and everyone likes him. I wish my grandmother were here because she’d have loved Mason.

I didn’t tell him what to expect.

Not because I wanted to surprise him—I’m not a person who stages things for effect—but because I genuinely didn’t know how to explain the Bear Dance to someone who hadn’t grown up with it. And as my grandmother would say, some things you can only know by being there.

I watched him know it.

I watched him play with Cam, connect with Daniel, tease Auntie Carol, shake hands with the Bear Dance Chief, drink sumac-ade with Elder Nokoni—and watched him watch me as I danced.

Oh, but that was something, dancing with him here.

Dancing together has become our thing. But here, at the Bear Dance, that was special. Having my family see us together, accept him, that was magical.

My heart is full—so utterly content.

After Griffin, I didn’t think I’d trust a man again, give myself to him—but then I met Mason, and it was like meeting someone destined for me. We connected not just here in the physical world but in the spiritual plane. I know it sounds like hooey, and I won’t say it aloud, but I feel it, nevertheless.