Page 90 of The Lonely Road

Wíitsin raised me to understand that love isn’t a transaction, that you don’t give it to get it back, you give it because it’s true.

And I believe that.

I believe it in the way I believe the law: not perfectly, not without doubt, but as the best framework available.

Tonight, in the dark, his body around mine, it costs.

I close my eyes.

Eventually, I sleep.

When I wake, he’s still there.

I notice it before I’m fully awake—the weight of him, the warmth, the sound of his breathing beside me. The pale light of early morning is coming through the curtains. Ignacio is waking up outside the window, a dog somewhere, someone starting a truck.

I lie still for a moment and let myself have this—just this, just the fact of waking up beside someone I love in my grandmother’s house, with my shawl across the chair and the silver earrings on the nightstand and the drums from yesterday still somewhere in my body, in my chest, in the bones of my feet.

I get up, and I hear him, a soft rustle behind me.

“Taya, I’m sorry,’ he says,

I turn, glance at him, smile, no matter how much it hurts. “I know. I am, too.”

I leave him and make coffee.

I sit on the porch in the early morning with a quilt around my shoulders and a mug between my hands, and the mesa going from gray to gold as the sun comes up, as the day begins.

When he comes out twenty minutes later, fresh from a shower, he is—for just a moment, in the early light—like someone who has been somewhere real and isn’t yet sure what to do about it.

He sits beside me.

I fill a second cup from Wíitsin’s moka pot. It’s still warm.

We drink coffee on my grandmother’s porch, and neither of us says anything, and the not-saying-anything has a different quality than last night.

No pressure.

No aftermath.

“We should go,” I say finally.

“Yes,” he agrees.

We go inside.

I make the bed the way Wíitsin would want it made.

I close the windows.

I take one last look at the kitchen—the cabinet, the hook, the Moka pot she never replaced—and I pick up my bag.

I lock the door.

Mason is already in the passenger seat of my Wrangler.

With a heavy heart, I drive us back north to Wildflower Canyon.

CHAPTER 23