“You’re not a kid anymore. You don’t have to be friends with him. You’re in control. You’ve got a good life here. A good mom. Good friends. A daughter at home and a pretty girl on your arm.” He peered closer, looking at me curiously. My face gavenothing away. “Or about to be, I hope. Nothing needs to change at all if you don’t want it to.”
I tipped my head back against the seat, my hands on my head, willing the emotion swirling around inside of me to subside. I wanted to balk at his advice, but I couldn’t do that to him.
Layne Marten couldn’t have known the effect he would have on me when he’d given a job to a fourteen-year-old wannabe cowboy all those years ago.
I owed my mother my life. I owed her for my drive and my will to provide and to succeed. She taught me how to be strong and to laugh when I wanted to cry. More times than I could remember, she would come home from working all night at the diner and stay up late enough to make me breakfast and see me off to school. She’d mend my pants when I was always tearing holes through them. She made it to every rodeo she could. Until recently, nobody’s hugs had even come close to hers.
She was my heart.
But if there was any other good thing of value inside of me, I owed that to Layne Marten. He taught me how to respect women by the way he treated his wife. He taught me to value the people in our lives more than the disagreements—a lesson I was still learning. He showed up at every rodeo he could to watch me ride. He’d challenge Dusty and me to a basketball game after chores whenever he saw us shooting hoops. At least until we’d be beating him so badly he’d started faking injuries to get out of it. He taught me the value of hard work. Of doing a job right the first time. Fixing something when it was broken. He taught me that being a dad had nothing to do with the blood running through a man’s veins.
In his eyes, he had just given me a job. He couldn’t have known then that he’d be helping to raise me into a man because my father wasn’t around to do it.
And he wasn’t finished.
“But you’ve got a truck you’ve been holding on to for years.” I finally eyed Layne, who was blurry around the edges. “And don’t give me your crap about trying to find a landmine. Your heart’s too big to blow that thing up, Jake. You want it too much. And I’m not talking about the truck.”
24
JAKE
The next morning,I pulled into my driveway and put the truck in park. There were so many things I needed to do before I could drop into my bed, but I couldn’t fathom moving from this truck to do any of them. So I sat there, my hands on the wheel, working up the energy to get out.
After staying all night at the hospital on the couch next to my mom’s bed, I had a crick in my neck that refused to ease up. My eyes felt like they’d been filled with gravel. And for the second night in a row, I hadn’t slept a wink. I couldn’t. There’d been too many thoughts whirling like a tornado in my head for me to sleep. I’d showered at the hospital, but other than an old shirt of Cade’s he’d brought for me, I still wore the clothes from the campout.
Eventually, I stumbled out of my truck, tired and dirty and wanting nothing more than to see my bed, when Shelby stepped out of my house and onto my porch, her phone in her hand, looking every bit like she belonged there.
Her hair was curly and wet and thrown up high in a ponytail, out of her face. Just like how I’d seen her a thousand times growing up. Her feet were bare, and she wore her gray joggersand a white t-shirt—probably what she slept in—and I’d never seen a sight as beautiful as that.
As beautiful as her.
It was enough to stop me in my tracks. The kind of sight that had the power to completely change my life’s trajectory at one glance.
It was her.
It hadalwaysbeen her.
25
SHELBY
A warm summermorning greeted me as I stepped outside Jake’s house in my joggers, barefoot and feeling twitchy. After a restless night spent on Jake’s couch, half worried about Jake and his mom and half worried that Sophie would have another nightmare (she didn’t), I had called it quits and showered in the early hours of the morning. Sophie woke up not long after, so I could only be bothered to throw my hair up in a messy top knot. Once she had eaten breakfast, I settled her in front of the TV to watch cartoons while I called for an update at the hospital. I had just found Jake’s name in my phone when I glanced up and stopped short.
Jake’s truck was parked outside his house. He stood next to it, his hand on the door, and he was staring at me, almost like he’d seen a ghost.
Which led me to wonder exactly how bad I currently looked.
“I came outside to call you,” I said.
He was wearing a wrinkled, old Colorado State University shirt of Cade’s, which Kelsey had brought to the hospital for Jake to borrow. His hair looked disheveled and he had three days' worth of stubble on his face. Other than his unnervinggaze still on me, he had the look of a man who’d been through hell and back in the past twenty-four hours.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, sinking down onto the top porch step.
He blinked, and after a moment, he trudged toward me.
“Where’s Soph?” he asked.
“She’s watching cartoons.”