The injustice, the ridiculousness of it, burned through the numbness.
“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Jack,” Walter said, his voice laced with the old steel. “I’m not dead yet.”
“No,” Jack agreed, looking cold and removed. “But it won’t be too hard to prove that you’re unfit to make the decision. You’re drinking. You’re sick and my guess is you’re not taking your meds—”
“I am,” he insisted.
Mia started to shake her head. Were they nuts? Was Jack…nuts?
Anger churned in her belly. She would fight him. She would fight him with everything she had.
“In order to clear whatever debt you have and make sure that you’re cared for as you get sicker—and that Mia has a chance at a life she deserves—you need to get rid of this place.”
“A life I deserve?” Mia stood, the legs of the chair screeching against the floor as she backed up. “What the hell would you know about it, Jack?”
“I know this place is going to wear you down to nothing,” he said. “Between the work, paying off the debt and taking care of an old drunk—”
Walter flinched at the word; Jack saw it but didn’t say anything. Clearly he didn’t care.
“We’re not selling the ranch,” she said. “As your wife, I have some say in this.”
“We’re getting a divorce, remember? You don’t get a vote.”
She reeled back as if he’d slapped her. He wouldn’t sink so low. Or maybe he would. She didn’t know anymore.
“You can’t do this, Jack,” she snapped. “You can’t just swoop in here—”
“I’m not trying to be malicious,” he said.
“Let me finish my sentence!” she yelled, banging her hand on the table. That got his attention. “You’re not listening to us. You can’t swoop in here and sell this ranch. You don’t have the right to make that decision.”
She wanted to slap that baffled look right off his face.
“Someone has to, and you two sure as hell aren’t doing it.”
Mia shook her head, so angry and hurt she trembled. Every argument she needed to make sputtered and died under the weight of her anger.
Between the work and the lack of sleep, the past week had worn her out, and she couldn’t put together a string of coherent words. She needed a second to get her thoughts together, to be able to have a conversation that wouldn’t end with her smacking him.
Leaving her cup and the ham behind, she grabbed her hat and took off for the barn.
WALTER STARED at his son, wondering what kind of devil lived in that boy’s head.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Walter asked.
“I’m just trying to do what’s right,” Jack whispered.
“I don’t think Mia’s going to see it that way,” Walter said.
Jack turned to face him, and Walter tried not to shrink under his damning gaze. He’d done wrong by his son a thousand times and it wasn’t anything he was proud of.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Jack said.
“I am,” he said and that seemed to bring Jack up short. The apologies Walter had saved up over the years, the regrets he’d carried in his palms like river stones, were burdens he rushed to unload. He reached for his son. “I should have protected you. I should have seen—”
“Not me,” Jack snapped. “Her!” He pointed out the window to where Mia was making her way across the grass toward the barn. One of the dogs circled her, no doubt smelling the ham on her fingers.
“If you want to help me,” Jack said, “if you want to make things right between us, then help me convince her to sell the ranch. Help me get her free of this place.”
Free of this place? Walter shook his head, so sad that his only son, his flesh and blood, saw the ranch that way.
Walter had been blindsided when Jack and Mia got married five years ago. He’d always known they were close…but marriage? But Walter had stopped understanding his son by the time Jack had become a teenager.
As the years went by and Walter finally caught on that Jack and Mia’s relationship was a marriage in name only, he’d kept his mouth shut.
He’d watched Mia walk out that door a few times a year to meet Jack someplace, with her eyes alight like a girl’s on a first date.
And she always came back hollowed out.
As hollowed as Jack was now, watching Mia cross the long yard to the barn.
Stupid kids, Walter thought, wasting so much time.
They didn’t know how precious time was, how it could run in the other direction, a train they had no chance of catching.
Two weeks ago, Walter had believed that his son’s being back at the ranch was a chance to make the mistakes of his past right.
But now, standing amid the wreckage of his son’s marriage, Walter wondered if it was a chance for Jack to correct his own mistakes.
Walter hoped so. For the girl out in that barn who worked so hard and loved so much. And for Jack…who deserved a shot at being happy. At being loved.
Walter stood, arranging his shaky, weak limbs beneath his weight. He’d shrunk since getting sick, but he was still a big man and when he stood up straight, Jack blinked.
“You got it wrong, boy,” he said. “You want to help her, drop this idea of selling the ranch.”
“That’s you talking—” Jack began. Walter cut him off with a shake of his head.
“Go out there and talk to her,” he said. “Listen to her. She’ll tell you.”
Walter was glad he’d gotten rid of the walker in favor of the cane. It made a better exit.
JACK FOUND HER out in the barn, the remaining calving supplies spread out across the tack room table.
Good God, the woman was doing inventory.
“Mia,” he said.
Mia’s back stiffened and her anger was so palpable the dog at her feet whined.
“Mia,” Jack said to the back of her head. “Can I talk to you?”
“I’m busy,” she muttered.
“Mia—”
“Fine.” She turned, her face so composed she looked like someone else. Someone older and colder. He was off balance around this version of her. Sun hit dust motes in the air, turning them to glitter that matched the gold in her eyes.
“I’m not trying to piss you off,” he said.
“Let me guess. You’re trying to help.”
“Yes,” he said. “Why is that a bad thing?”
“Because selling the ranch isn’t going to help, Jack.” She was looking at him as if he was the fool for not realizing this. And he honestly didn’t understand why she couldn’t see it his way.
“You’re bleeding money.”
“Not anymore. We had a good calving season and once we go to market, I can pay the taxes.”
“But you’re shorthanded. You need at least three more guys in the barn, not to mention a live-in housekeeper. Dad is drinking—”
“Your dad always drank.”
“Yeah, but now he’s sick. And Parkinson’s, no matter what, only gets worse, Mia. Not better.”
“But if he keeps taking his meds he could have years before I need to worry about what to do with him.”
“And then what?”
“And then I’ll think of something. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll step up and do something. As his son.”
The shot registered down deep, but he pushed it aside. He was good at that. All the things in front of him were organized, clear. His work. His job. Even his marriage. All neatly labeled and properly shelved.
But all those emotions he pushed to the side, the memories of his parents and his past that he refused to deal with, were a jumbled mess on the outskirts of his life. And they were beginning to cloud his vision.
“Mia, that’s no way to plan.”
“I don’t have any other answer, Jack. Because I am not selling this ranch.”
“What about the divorce?” He waited for her answer, unsure of when he’d started to care about what that answer mig
ht be.
She chewed her lip. “Forget it.”
He laughed, his pride prickling. “You’ll stay married to me in order to keep this place?”
“It’s my home!” she declared, her eyes catching fire. “And I get that you don’t understand how I feel—”
“Of course I do,” he snapped back. “It’s why I married you in the first place. So you could keep your home. So you could have the life you told me you always wanted. But this isn’t that life.”
“You don’t get to decide that, Jack! You don’t get to waltz back in here and make these sweeping decisions on my behalf.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh, Jack, you don’t even see it. That’s what you do. You walk into a world, change it and then leave before the dust settles. You don’t stick around to see what you’ve done.”
He blinked and took a step back. Another. His stomach ached, the truth like stones rattling around inside him.
“Are you talking about Africa?” he asked. She’d torn the blinders from his eyes, and the world she’d revealed was different than the one he knew.
He wasn’t always the hero. Africa was complicated and he treated his work there like it was simple. A problem to solve.
That was how he treated everything. Because it was simpler.
She paused, her lips parted. “Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I just know what you did to me five years ago.”
“Five years ago you needed me. Just like you need me now. This isn’t emotional, Mia. It’s reality.”
She stepped up close, so close he smelled the coffee on her breath. “You want the reality?” The word slashed and burned between them, changing everything, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. “I didn’t need you then, Jack. And I don’t need you now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Five years ago, I had a job offer from Annie Stone. She needed a foreman and I could have just moved over there—”
“But your mom? Lucy?”
“They’d already decided to move to Los Angeles. Mom wanted to go, wanted to leave the drama of this ranch behind. Start someplace fresh.”
Jack tried to add it all up but things still didn’t make sense.
Nothing made sense.
“Then why did you marry me?”
MIA COULDN’T RUN from this question. Had in fact driven them to this point. And she found, facing down this truth, that she wanted to get rid of this burden. This load she’d carried for so long, all by herself.
She was so tired. Tired of carrying it. Tired of pretending.
Her body went still. Her mind quieted.
This would end everything. He’d leave, she had no doubt. She’d file for the divorce and he’d sign. They’d probably never see each other again and that hurt. It hurt so much she pushed the thought away.
But Jack wasn’t equipped to deal with the truth, even though he stood there talking about emotion and reality as if he had any idea what her life was really like.
She breathed the smells of the barn, the straw and feed. The horses. She’d put down roots here, roots that went all the way to the bedrock of the mountains behind her and Jack. What he thought, or what she felt about him, couldn’t change that.
This was going to sting, no doubt about it, but in the end she’d be okay. Because she had these roots.
“I married you because I loved you,” she said care fully. It was as if a weight, heavy and tiresome, fell from her tongue, into a silence so deep it made her dizzy.
It took a moment for her words to register but when they did Jack’s jaw dropped.
She would’ve laughed if it hadn’t hurt so badly. “I’ve loved you my whole life and when you said you’d marry me I said yes because I wanted to be your wife.”
“Mia,” he breathed, and stupidly, she couldn’t move.
Despite all her brave talk, she was scared. She was hopeful.
A girl standing in front of the boy she loved, with her heart shivering in the open air.
Idiot, she scolded herself, don’t do this. Don’t care.
But she couldn’t help it.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he started to shake his head.
Oh. Oh, God. Her heart fell into pieces.
She sucked in a quick breath as if she’d been punched in the stomach, and with the breath came all the pain she knew would come with telling him how she felt. She’d kept her feelings a secret for a reason.
He didn’t love her. She’d always known it and it still hurt.
Embarrassment swamped her, followed by an agony so big she had to brace herself against the stall or fall to her knees in front of him.
“Mia.” He reached for her, the jackass, and she stepped away, nearly hissing in warning, a wounded animal ready to strike out. “I had no idea,” he whispered.
“I know.” Tears, stupid tears burned behind her eyes and she curled her hands into fists, digging her ragged nails into her palms. She’d told the truth and now she needed to work through this vast ocean of hurt. Needed to get to the other side and move on with her life.
It wasn’t Jack’s fault he didn’t love her.
“I was always just…little Mia to you and that’s okay, Jack. And I knew going in what this marriage would be like. I knew you’d be gone most of the time and that, in time, you’d probably—” She stopped, swallowed. Her pride sticking in her throat. “Find someone else.”
“I didn’t,” he said quickly. “I mean, I never cheated.”
“I know,” she said. Likely because he forgot to, or got too busy looking at charts and digging holes to notice the women falling at his feet.
Just as he’d been too busy growing up and away to notice her.
“What was Santa Barbara?” he asked.
“It was goodbye.” She shrugged. “You were right the other night. I was a coward. I ran because…because it hurt to finally have you just when I’d decided to let you go. And I’m sorry I didn’t answer your emails. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me after the attack. I just never thought…I never thought you would.”
The silence pounded against her ears as if she’d gone too deep underwater and she realized, in an instant, that she couldn’t stand here anymore, watching him watch her.
She backed away. “If you want to help me—and I know you do, Jack, I’ve never doubted that—but if you really want to help, stop talking about selling the ranch and leave. Go back to your life. Let me have mine.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE WALLS OF HIS ROOM were stifling. Suffocating. Jack walked through the rest of the house, unchanged since his mother had lived here, and he couldn’t quite handle that, either. So he grabbed the keys for Mia’s finicky pickup truck and then ransacked the mudroom for some tools.
“Where are you headed?” his father asked, standing in the doorway to the living room.
Go back to your life. Mia’s words echoed in his mind.
“Good question, Dad,” he said and left.
He remembered the well in the high pasture. He’d put it together himself as part of an advanced earth science class in high school. Frankly, he was surprised the thing still worked.
Within minutes of taking the mechanism apart, he saw that Mia had been keeping the pump together with a wing and a prayer and probably a fortune in gasket replacements. He laid the parts out on the back of the truck and did his best to clean them. The work was familiar. Comforting. Like the exertion of the past few days.
His hands got busy and his mind went right back to Mia.
I’ve loved you my whole life.
Had he been blind? Or was she that good at hiding her feelings? He played over every encounter in the past five years, pulling apart his memories for a clue. A sign. And maybe, in hindsight there were some, but they were practically in code.
How he must have hurt her. Over and over again. The Los Angeles trip. He remembered her sitting in that lawyer’s office, listening to him talk about wills and trust funds, all
the precautions Jack was taking in case he died.
And she’d sat there like a statue. Blinking into the sunlight coming in the window. Her hands clenched in her lap.
And that night, in that terrible hotel, how shy she’d been coming out of the bathroom. How quiet. So un-Mia-like. He’d barely registered it, preoccupied with the year ahead, his final preparations.
Regret choked him. Regret that he’d been so blind, so cavalier with her. And for a second he couldn’t stand his own skin.
He thought about that night in Santa Barbara, the frantic way she’d made love. And how she’d left, run away while he gloated to himself in the bathroom.
I’m sorry, Mia. I’m such an ass.
He started shaving down the threading on the pump, solving the gasket problem once and for all. Wishing he could solve the problem of his life as easily.
How was it possible she loved him? he wondered. Though he had to admit her parents, Sandra and A.J., had been good role models in that department. Wildly unlike his own. Their marriage had been solid, a loving one until A.J.’s death five and a half years ago. After which, Victoria went all the way off her rocker and tried to kick Mia’s family off the ranch.
But at what point had he earned Mia’s love? Child hood, he supposed, those rooftop trips. He’d seen the hero worship. Hell, everyone had seen that. He’d just never been aware that it had turned into something else.
He sifted through his feelings, taking each one out to examine it, testing its weight and strength. Affection and lust he had in spades. Concern. Respect. Was it an equation? If he added up all those things, would the end result be love?
He didn’t think so.
Love was something else, not that he was entirely sure what it was, but it had to be something specific.
Singular. An entity in and of itself.
And he would know it if he felt it. Wouldn’t he? It shouldn’t be a question. Love should be a fact.
And the fact was…he didn’t love Mia.
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