She isn’t one bit sorry. Not right now. Not when she closes the door of that car and the window is down and there are crickets and millions of stars and miles and miles of open road. For once, she is not the one making the careful, thought-out decisions that make her the practical sister, because there is no question: This is a mistake. This is a doomed mission of the heart, and Veronica May Fontaine says no life worth living is absent a few of those. Of course, Veronica May Fontaine had tipped back more than one Moscow mule before she said it, and Nash’s mother had only rolled her eyes. By that time, Alice had heard it all.

But this night, no theory of love matters. No consequences do. There is a thin yellow curve of moon in that big, big desert sky. The night air smells like dry grass and horse manure and summer. Nash is flying down that dirt road with her true love beside her, and she is filled with all the complicated themes of two people bound together by circumstances of fate—rescue and renewal, joy and fear, connection and inevitable loss.

She has made a promise. A vow. She may be only eighteen years old—Jack Waters called her Peanut before he stopped seeing her as a child—but you don’t grow up on a divorce ranch and not learn to take a vow seriously.

Honestly, though? It may seem terrible to say—horrible, a betrayal—but even the vow, the terrible night of it, the metallic smell of blood and the sound of thunder that wasn’t thunder but horse hooves, hundreds of them, has retreated in the face of this. This soaring. This rise in her whole body now, as they pick up speed and the ranch falls away behind them and there is only the sweet catastrophe of what’s to come.