His face goes white. "What do you mean it doesn't matter?"
"She's having your baby, Wyatt." Each word is tar. "Do you have any idea what it's like to grow up wondering why your father chose someone else over you? To spend your whole childhood believing you weren't worth staying for?"
"You think I'd abandon my own child?" His voice is raw with horror and heartbreak.
The question knocks the wind from me. Of course he wouldn't abandon his child. That's what makes this impossible. That's what makes Wyatt different from my father and every other man my mother warned me about.
This isn't about choices or him picking sides. This is about reality crashing into the fairy tale I'd barely let myself believe in.
He has a baby coming. A family to build with someone else. And I have to do damage control.
"No. Which is why you can't love me." I turn away before he can see the truth in my eyes—that part of me wants to believe him desperately, wants to find a way through this impossible tangle. But wanting isn't enough. Not with a child in the balance. My heels click against the concrete as I move away, each step costing more than the last. The band shifts to a slower melody as I weave between clusters of guests.
"Kinsley!"
His voice cracks behind me, anguished and reaching, but I don't stop. Can't stop. If I stop, I'll break.
Inside, I'm mourning a future I barely let myself imagine—quiet mornings on the ranch, Wyatt's hands gentle in my hair, the possibility of belonging somewhere, to someone, for keeps. Our own baby—or babies. I wanted two. Preferably, little girls, so I didn't have to watch my babies ride bulls, but I would have done it for him—for them—because I would have loved them that much.
I love him that much.
I look up and pray the tears won't fall. My eyes sting, and my heart hurts worse. I reach for that empty feeling and shove everything into the void.
Love ends.
Dreams shatter.
But work—work is always there, demanding nothing but competence and giving back exactly what you put into it. And if there’s a chance I can salvage anything out of this night, I’ve got to try.
On the dance floor, couples sway under a string of lights to Cash’s ballad about a second chance at love while I catalog the evening's wreckage. Martinez's split lip. The possiblemedia nightmare waiting to explode. The ranch that still needs saving, somehow, without the senator's support.
I've got hours to come up with a new strategy to salvage this situation or accept what I've always known—that some places aren't meant to be home, no matter how badly you wish they were.
Forty-Two
SAVE THE RANCH—WHATEVER IT COSTS YOU.
WYATT
The rooster’s first call breaks the dark at four-thirty. I'm already awake, staring at the hand-hewn oak beams of my bedroom ceiling, listening to the cottonwoods scrape against the windows.
Sleep didn't come—not after standing on Kinsley's porch for twenty minutes last night, knocking and calling her name into that silent, dark cottage that felt as empty as I do right now.
The place looked abandoned. Not a light on anywhere, her truck cold like it hadn't moved all day. Either she wasn't there, or she was hiding from me so deep that all my desperate knocking couldn't reach her. Both possibilities settle in my chest like rocks at the bottom of the river.
I swing my legs over the edge of the queen-size bed thatreplaced my twin when I turned fourteen. The solid walnut frame doesn't make a sound—quality craftsmanship never does.
The hardwood floor's cold against my bare feet as I pull on jeans and grab a clean shirt from the walk-in closet. I press my hand to that spot in my chest that's been aching since Kinsley said my love didn't matter. I've taken plenty of hits in the arena, been thrown by bulls; but that one... that one might've broken something I don't know how to fix.
I pad down the hallway, past the gallery of family photos that chronicle five generations of Halloway men and women who fought to keep this land. Great-great-grandfather Jack stares down from his sepia-toned portrait, the man who walked away from the original Gritstone Ranch to carve out his own piece of heaven with nothing but determination and a stubborn streak that runs in our blood. He and I have the same set to our jaw that says we'll die before we quit.
But Jack Halloway never had to choose between the woman who completed his soul and the land that coursed through his veins.
I expect to step into a dark kitchen but instead find coffee percolating in the ancient aluminum pot Dad refuses to replace and the low murmur of voices discussing problems too big for this time of day.
Mom and Dad look every bit as haggard as I feel. Dad's graying hair sticks up at odd angles and his dress shirt is wrinkled like he slept in it. The lines around his eyes seem deeper this morning, carved by worry and decisions that shouldn't have to be made.
Mom's not much better. Her light brown hair is mussed and rebellious. She's wearing her bathrobe and slippers. Butit's her eyes that get me, red-rimmed and bright with unshed tears she's too proud to let fall.