I don’t know what else to say. I believe deep down, Ashley did love our son. She was just lost and couldn’t drag herself back.
All my brothers are here, filling the house the way they always do when things go sideways. Colt is in the back office trying to reach Enzo for help with the investigation. In the meantime, Ace is working his own angle, figuring out who he can lean on, pressure, or outright blackmail to get access to security feeds near Ashley’s house.
Someone saw something. Someone always does. In towns like this, nothing goes unnoticed.
“Hunter, you need to get some rest,” Beau tells me, dropping into the chair beside me.
“No.” I don’t look up.
Wyatt needs me more than I need sleep. He needs to feel my arms around him when he wakes up from the nightmare he’s going to have tonight, and the one after that, and every one that follows.
“Where is Reese?” Beau asks.
I shrug. “He went to his office this morning. Said he works better in silence.”
Reese worked his magic; that’s why I’m not in a cell right now.
Beau nods, and I take a breath, pressing my chin against the top of Wyatt’s head. He smells like birthday cake and sunscreen and the grass he was rolling in yesterday when the world was still whole. “What do you need me to do, Hunter?”
“I need you to find out who did this. Work with Ace and Colten. Keep the ranch running. We’ve got to fight back.”
He nods. His eyes drop to his nephew curled up in my arms, and something flickers across his face. I’d guess it was pain, but Beau is hard to get read on.
“Do you think it was the Greeks?” he asks, voice barely above a whisper.
I cut him a look sharp enough to draw blood.Not in front of my son.
He gets the message.
I shift Wyatt gently, brushing the hair from his damp forehead. His crying has slowed to hiccups now, his eyes red and swollen, and staring at nothing.
“Did you want to go and see Gary?” I ask, keeping my voice soft. “Feed Tornado too?”
He sniffles and wipes his nose on my shirt. “Yeah. I do.”
I smile. Even though my heart is fracturing into pieces so small I’ll never find them all.
Am I doing this right? The question loops through my head on a track that never stops. Am I giving him what he needs so he doesn’t grow up carrying this like a scar across his chest?
I bet Lola would know the right things to do and say. She just had that way about her. The kind of gentleness that doesn’t come from textbooks. The way she looked at Wyatt at the party, like he was the most important person in the room.
Fuck. Lola.
As if it wasn’t complicated enough.
There’s no world in which she’s going to be interested in a man arrested for the murder of his ex. This town talks. Word will spread through New Falls like a brushfire, and by the time it reaches her, it’ll be twisted into something worse than the truth.
She should run from me.
And this time, I can’t chase her.
I shake my head and stand, hoisting Wyatt onto my hip. He’s almost too big for it now, legs dangling past my knees, but he tucks his face into my neck the way he did when he was two and the world felt too loud.
I carry him out to Gary’s stable. And it’s like that goat knows. The second we walk in, Gary bolts across the pen and nearly takes Wyatt out at the ankles, butting his head against his legs, bleating in that obnoxious way that used to drive me insane.
Wyatt laughs.
It’s small and fragile. But it’s there. A sound I really needed today.