"Buckle Bunny Brittney was there. Claims we hooked up while I was out of it. Now she's pregnant and her daddy wants me to marry her."
"They have tests, you know." Jake states the obvious.
"I can’t prove it’s not mine in time.” Even if I could,Martinez would make me marry her because I’m who she wants.
Gritstone is disappearing in my rearview mirror, getting smaller and smaller until it's just another dot on the map. The wide-open road stretches ahead but I still can’t breathe deep.
"Where are you?"
"Right now? Getting as far away from here as possible. I'll find a bull to ride, something to make me feel like myself again."
"What about Kinsley?"
I try to answer but my voice cracks and I clear my throat hard. "She let me go, Jake. Made it easy."
"That doesn't sound easy.”
He's right, and that makes it worse. She stood there and broke her own heart to save mine.
"I have to marry Brittney." The words come out raw, scraped from somewhere deep.
"Come on, man, don’t be stupid.”
“I was stupid and now I’m paying the price.”
A semi-truck passes me going the other direction, its horn blaring in the wind.
The phone goes quiet, and I figure Jake's run out of things to say. Can't blame him. What do you tell a friend who's stuck?
"Call me when you get wherever you're going," he says finally. "Don't ride blind.”
Riding blind is when your head is somewhere else, and you aren’t dialed in. "Yep.”
I hang up and toss the phone on the passenger seat. The radio's playing some song about heartbreak and whiskey, likeevery country song ever written. I punch the button and find talk radio instead. Weather reports and traffic updates, the kind of ordinary problems that have ordinary solutions.
The speedometer needle creeps past seventy, then eighty. Fast enough to feel like escape, not quite fast enough to outrun the truth that's chasing me down this empty highway.
I have to marry Brittney Martinez.
I might save the ranch, but it’ll cost me Kinsley.
I’m never going back there.
Forty-Five
THE WORD—FAMILY—HAUNTS ME OUT THE DOOR.
KINSLEY
I've never quit anything in my life.
But they say there’s a first time for everything so I’m walking up to the main house with a resignation letter in my hand. I tried and I can’t find a way forward out of this mess. Martinez was the way out—now he’s nothing but a roadblock, better yet, a road closed.
Sarah’s at the kitchen table, surrounded by ranch papers and her open laptop. The morning light catches the reading glasses perched on her nose, and she looks so calm that I wonder if she’s real.
I walk in and sit down across from her without a word. I set the letter down on the table. I printed it on my thick, fancy paper out of respect for her. It seemed like a good ideaat three in the morning. I slide it across to her with hands that shake despite my best efforts to keep them steady.
I don’t have words. I mean, I plan to apologize but that’ll come after she acknowledges that I’ve failed worse than either of us could have foreseen.