Hannah and Abby parked outside one of the restaurants in town, set apart from the main stretch in a small field. It was done up to look like a barn, with reclaimed wood everywhere inside and a terrace out back that was strung with sparkling fairy lights. Abby smiled and waved at people as she led the way through the tables, taking Hannah to a table where two women waited.
One of them, Hannah was happily surprised to see, was the woman from the bookstore.
“I was wondering if you were that Hannah,” Hope said as the introductions were made, with that same warm, delighted smile that made Hannah smile back as if they were already friends.
“She really was.” The petite woman next to her, Rae, let out the kind of rich, infectious laugh that had people at nearby tables turning and smiling along. She was that potent. “She spent the last twenty minutes wondering, out loud, if a random woman she met one day in the bookstore—”
“And in Abby’s coffeeshop,” Hope interjected.
“—was, in fact, the famous Hannah who somehow got Ty Everett to propose marriage.”
“Not only propose marriage,” Hope said. “But actually make it to the altar.”
She and Rae both eyed Hannah’s left hand and the ring she wore. Hannah flushed despite herself.
“Maybe we could sit down,” Abby suggested dryly. “And continue grilling Hannah while pretending to be civilized.” She shook her head at Hannah. “I’m sorry. They’re relentless. And yes, they’re always like this.”
“I would consider myself more insatiably curious than relentless,” Hope argued.
Rae belted out another laugh. “I’m just nosy.”
They all sat at the rustic wood table out there beneath the pretty lights, and Hannah braced herself for an inquisition. But none came. They were distracted by the appearance of the waiter and the chalkboard list of specials.
“You probably don’t know how exciting this is,” Abby said, from her place beside Hannah. “This is a new restaurant for Cold River. It only opened in May.” She nodded toward the chalkboard. “And the owner clearly believes that Cold River is bursting at the seams with hipsters and tourists galore who want to spend all their money on fancy omelet entrées for dinner when most of the people around here have their own chickens.”
“Summer restaurants always come in all optimistic,” Rae agreed from across the table. “And then limp off sometime in mid-February. Winters are a whole thing here.”
“It’s a new town initiative,” Hope said. “They’re trying to lure in more wedding trade from Denver. The more they can make Cold River a four-season destination, the more restaurant choices we’ll have.”
They all ordered when the waiter came back, and then the three friends started talking, easily ranging from topics involving Cold River’s restaurant scene to names for Abby’s baby.
“I still don’t know how you can handle not knowing what you’re having,” Rae said, shaking her head. “I would want to know immediately.”
“You love Aunt Hope the best,” Hope was murmuring directly to Abby’s belly, reaching over the table to rest her hand on the bump. “Aunt Hope.”
“I’m going to know soon enough,” Abby said cheerfully, swatting Hope’s hand away.
Hannah felt as out of place as she’d worried she would, but, oddly, she didn’t mind. If anything, it was an unexpected treat to be able to sit there, participate in the conversation as she chose, but otherwise not feel compelled to do anything at all but be present. She didn’t have to perform. She didn’t have to make anyone feel better. She wasn’t the ambassador for anything anymore, but at home, she still acted the part.
She’d been so determined to keep her heartbreak to herself as much as she could in Sweet Myrtle. To prove to anyone who might be watching her—from her mother to the folks she’d gone to high school with to her disappointed donors—that she was fine. Good, even. That really, despite any rumors to the contrary, she’d wanted it all to be this way.
Hannah had worked so hard to always keep her head up, always remain calm and courteous. Even when uppity, jealous old classmates like that Heather Wardley questioned whether Hannah was moral enough to be around Heather’s ill-mannered kids. To Hannah’s face.
But that act wasn’t required here. For one thing, Abby and her friends could carry on the conversation all on their own, whether Hannah participated or not. And for another, they knew nothing about her. They certainly didn’t know the key bit of information that kept everyone in Sweet Myrtle so focused on her trajectory from rodeo to regret.
Maybe because of that, she let herself drift. She let herself tumble a bit, straight off into the kind of daydream that was nothing but dangerous. Hannah allowed herself to imagine what it would be like if this really was her life. If Jack were here in Cold River and home with Ty tonight, for example—an image that about made her start sobbing right there at the table.
What if she and Ty really did live here, tucked up together in that sweet little house, raising Jack together, the way it had been supposed to be? What if she got to have nights like this, filled with laughter, entertaining conversation, and women she strongly suspected she could be friends with? Real friends. The kind of friends who were thrilled about a pregnancy and celebrated it, instead of avoiding their friends’ eyes in public or trying way too hard to act overly supportive when they clearly weren’t.
“What if” will only wreck you, Mama had always told her.
Hannah knew better than to indulge in it. Especially here.
Because she was lying to everyone.
Abby was bighearted enough to welcome Hannah with open arms. And Hannah was greedy enough to let her do it, all the while knowing that there was a high probability she would be leaving, never to return.
But she couldn’t help herself.
“So,” Hope said when dessert came, spinning her spoon around and around in the puddle of fudge surrounding her giant slice of mud pie. “Ty Everett.”
“That is his name, yes,” Hannah said with a laugh. “And in case you didn’t know, Ty isn’t short for anything. It’s not a nickname. Full cowboy, that one.”
“I need you to tell me everything.” Hope smiled, big and bright. “No detail is too small or too personal.”
“The details might be too personal for Hannah though, Hope,” Abby said, widening her eyes at her friend.
“Will we all be sharing personal details about our love lives?” Hannah asked, grinning. “Or only me?”
“Oh, no need,” Hope said airily. “Let me catch you up. Abby married the love of her life who she had a humiliating crush on since birth while he didn’t know she existed.”
“I wouldn’t call it humiliating,” Abby objected.
Hope’s expression suggested otherwise. “All’s well that ends well.” She pointed to herself. “Me, cursed to be single for the rest of my days.” She nodded toward Rae. “Rae, on the other hand…”
Rae glared at Hope. “It’s complicated.”
“Rae got married very young,” Abby said in aside to Hannah, though she didn’t drop her voice. “It’s better not to talk about it. Even when she brings it up.”
“It’s only complicated because his family and my family are constantly interacting,” Rae said, rolling her eyes. “Otherwise it’s boring.”
“The Kittredges are another founding family in the area,” Abby said. “A lot like the Everetts.”
“Oh, like Amanda Kittredge?” Hannah smiled. “I met her in the coffeehouse.”
“She’s a cute kid,” Rae said. If stiffly.
Hannah pictured Amanda blowing up Main Street.
“Is she a kid?” Hannah asked softly. “I thought she was around my age.”
Everyone stared. Because, Hannah was sure, none of them had spent any time at all thinking about Amanda Kittredge’s age. Not since they’d fixed her as a child in their heads years back.
“Now that you mention it, no,” Abby said after a moment. “She is not a kid. She’s in her twenties, which I know because she works for me.”
“In my head, she will always be about nine,” Rae said, and something moved over her face. “Wow.”
“Yes, yes, we all grow up,” Hope said impatiently. “Little Amanda Kittredge too. But Hannah. Tell us about Ty.”
“Relentless,” Abby mouthed at her.
Hannah sighed. “I don’t know how to answer that, really.”
“I had such a crush on him,” Rae said with a sigh. “It was that first Christmas he came home after he ran off and joined the rodeo. Do you guys remember?”
“Yes,” both Abby and Hope said at once. All three of them laughed.
“He swaggered into church on Christmas Eve, and we all lost our minds,” Rae said. Dreamily. “And you married him.”
Hannah grinned. “He still swaggers a lot.”
“Well, he’d have to. Right? He’s so…”
“Rae. Ty is Hannah’s husband,” Abby said reprovingly, shaking her head.
“What is it about those Everetts?” Hope asked. She hummed to herself. Happily. “What’s in the water out there? You better watch it, Abby. You’re going to give birth to one of them.”
That diverted all the attention back to Abby and her baby. The three friends laughed and told stories and otherwise enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
While Hannah sat there, feeling like such a fraud. The kind of woman who would sit and have these conversations about a marriage that was built on lies and lost memories. And a baby she was still keeping hidden. The kind of woman who would let these genuinely kind and funny people treat her like one of them when she wasn’t.
They would hate her when she was gone. And more if they discovered the extent of her lies. If they learned about Jack. They would sit around a table like this one, passing Abby’s baby from arm to arm and loving on it while they dissected this entire evening. They would look for the clues that told the truth about who Hannah really was and how she’d kept the only information that mattered to herself.
The worst part was, unlike her so-called friends from the rodeo who hadn’t waited for Hannah to leave before they started picking her apart, Hannah would deserve every single thing these people said about her.
She wasn’t sure why, of all the things she was going to have to live with once this time with Ty was over, that notion stung her so deeply.
Almost as if she didn’t want to leave, when she should. And soon.
That was the thought she took with her, after they all finished lingering over dessert and said their goodbyes out front. After she and Abby drove home together, Hannah taking the wheel so Abby could catnap on the way back, having clearly overextended herself.
“You can’t tell Gray I passed out in the car on the way home,” Abby said when she woke up as Hannah pulled into the dirt road that led to the ranch. “He’s already so overprotective, it’s ridiculous. He doesn’t like me driving my car, which is old, but fine. He got a ridiculous satellite phone so I could reach him on the surface of the moon, if necessary.”
“You’re lucky,” Hannah heard herself say, to her horror. Because her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “Gray seems like the kind of overprotective dad any child would be lucky to have.”
Unlike her child, who had no dad. Because Hannah had made certain of that.
Men always lie, Mama always said. You can’t trust them.
Hannah knew that was right. She’d lived it. But Hannah was lying too. How would she feel if the situations were reversed?
She couldn’t say she much liked her own answer to that.
The truck bounced down the dirt road, and Hannah was convinced that she’d somehow given it all away in that one sentence. That Abby somehow knew everything.
“Men who have a father like Amos have two choices,” Abby said, very quietly, into the darkness. “They can follow his example. They can double down on all that cruelty and make sure they spend their lives making everyone around them miserable, the way he did. Or they can go in the opposite direction. And Gray and his brothers would rip out their own hearts before they would spend a single day behaving the way their father did.”
Hannah wanted to believe that. How she wanted to believe that. But she knew better. And had to wonder if the problem wasn’t Ty. If she was the one who brought the meanness out in him. Her own father had wanted nothing to do with her to such an extent that he’d signed away his parental rights before she was born. Both sets of her grandparents had turned their back on her.
Maybe there was a common denominator that she needed to look at more closely.
“Did you know Amos?” she asked instead. And then sighed. “I mean, of course you must have known him. You grew up here.”
“My grandmother is a wise woman,” Abby said in her same quiet, kind way. “And on the day Amos Everett died, she shook her head while she was puttering around the kitchen in my family’s farmhouse, and she said that there is nothing sadder in this life than a person who is given every opportunity to make himself good, but chooses otherwise. Every time.”
Abby was likely thinking about Amos Everett. Hannah was thinking about her own choices. Which was yet another clue that she was in no position to judge Ty on anything.
“I’m not sure any person is one thing or another,” she said, when she could keep her voice even. “The sad truth is that most people are somewhere in the middle.”
“Here’s what I know about men,” Abby said, turning to look at Hannah as she pulled the truck into the yard and parked it near the ranch house’s back door. “And this is based my very scientific sample of one. But they take great pride in thinking they know what they want. Until you show them what they really want.”
“If you happen to know it.”
Hannah shouldn’t have let that slip out. But it was too late.
“They probably won’t thank you for it, at first,” Abby said, as if she hadn’t heard what Hannah had said. Much less the revealing way she’d said it. “But at the end of the day, all they really want—all anybody really wants—is someone who loves them. Don’t we?”
Hannah couldn’t help the scrape of a laugh that escaped her, then. “You make it sound simple. And it’s not. Or maybe it was for you, but then again, maybe you got lucky.”
Abby laughed. “Hope wasn’t kidding when she said I had a crush on Gray for my entire life. Or that it was humiliating. I loved my husband a long, long time before he loved me. I married him thinking I could love him enough for both of us, and he didn’t come around quickly. I’m not lucky. I’m stubborn.” She reached over and patted Hannah on her leg, a gesture of solidarity. “And from what I know about you, you’re just as stubborn. I’ve never met a man more adamant that marriage wasn’t for him than Ty. But he married you, didn’t he?”
Hannah wanted nothing more than to unload the whole, real story, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.
“He did,” she whispered.
And she was the only one who knew how much he’d loved her, then. She was the only one who remembered.
Later, once she’d washed her face, braided her hair, and changed into the tank top and pajama bottoms she wore to sleep in the same bed as the husband she was sleeping with—but still not having sex with, because she clearly liked to torture herself—Hannah found herself sitting on the couch in the main room of the little cabin. In her place.
Mama had left a bunch of messages, none of them friendly.
We’re coming up on two weeks, Hannah, she’d said in one of them, sounding as if she were in a wind tunnel. There’s trying to see if a marriage works, and then there’s abandoning your child. Which is this?
It was too late to call back home. Hannah had already called this morning, though Mama hadn’t answered. Hannah had assumed she was expressing her displeasure. And she didn’t want to raise her mother’s suspicions any by checking in at such a strange time. After midnight back home was too conspicuous. She didn’t want Luanne to know how fragile this all was.
Because she had everything she wanted. And yet nothing she wanted, at the same time.
Maybe she’d built a bridge with Becca tonight, but to what end? So the teenager could burn the dress in a fury if Hannah decided Ty didn’t deserve to know about Jack, and disappeared?
Abby treated her like a sister. The sister Hannah had always wanted and had never found in the groups of friends she’d made either at college or on the circuit. She’d had too much studying to do in college. And there was always too much competing on the circuit, so as nice as it was to spend time with the only people who knew what queening was all about, there were always boundaries. Walls. Fake smiles with malice behind them.
For a time, she’d had Ty. She’d finally found her person. Her one. Until that had all exploded all around her.
And now …
God, what a mess she’d made of this.
If she told him now, he would hate her. If she didn’t tell him, he would hate her anyway, because her time here was running out. She’d been away from Jack too long already.
No matter how long she sat there, worrying it through in her head, it all ended in the same place.
Ty was going to hate her. And his family and their friends here in Cold River were going to hate her too. All she was doing now was delaying the inevitable.
And the delaying only made her hate herself. More.
She rubbed at the place where her chest hurt the most, thinking back to that moment up there on the hill when she could have told him about Jack, but hadn’t. When she’d still had the opportunity to give Ty all the information she had, instead of holding back the most important part.
Now, she’d waited too long.
Men always lie, that voice in her insisted.
But why was she clinging to that? When as far she could tell, the only person lying here was her.
She could leave right now. She could pack up and go, before Ty came back from his trip out into the wilderness with his brothers. She didn’t expect him back until sometime tomorrow. Late, in all likelihood.
She could be out of the state by then, on her way home to her son.
But Hannah didn’t move. She didn’t leap to her feet, gather her things, and pack her bags.
The simple, sad, inescapable truth was that she didn’t want to leave. Her mother had been right. Playing house had done absolutely nothing but make all of this worse. It had only hurt her more.
Because now Hannah knew.
The way she’d always wanted to know.
Take away the rodeo, take away the sneaking around, the secret they’d kept, and all the extraneous things that she’d always wanted, so desperately, to get rid of—and living with Ty was exactly as she’d imagined it would be. Even taking away sex helped, because it made everything very clear. There was nothing to confuse the reality.
There were moments of friction, of course, but the simple truth was that she liked him.
She liked spending time with him. She liked the things he had to say, and she loved that she could never predict what they might be. She liked the way he took up space, and how he never took up too much of it because he was always aware of her. She liked the little things he did for her without ever discussing it, like making sure to turn on the coffee pot when he headed out in the mornings so it would be ready when she got out of the shower.
Hannah liked living with him, sharing space, sharing a bed, sharing each and every one of those odd, small moments that taken together, threaded into one, made a life.
The life that she could live with him. The life she’d always wanted to live with him.
If she didn’t have his baby.
Because that was still the kicker. He couldn’t remember, but she could.
They had never talked about children. They had been too busy trying to keep their hands off each other, then exulting in the fact they no longer had to try so hard. Ty had always taken care of the birth control, and Hannah hadn’t paid much attention when she kept missing periods because she’d never paid her cycle any mind. She hadn’t had to.
Until she counted back and realized it had been too long,
When she’d told her still-new husband that she was over three months pregnant, she’d expected him to be surprised. She’d certainly been surprised. Maybe even terrified. But filled with an odd, encompassing joy too.
Because wasn’t this the whole point?
But Ty hadn’t been surprised. He’d been flat-out furious.
And this was the truth Hannah still didn’t want to face. Ty might want to keep his vows to her. He might even fall in love with her again, if she stayed here.
But he was never going to magically transform into a man who wanted children, because he didn’t.
That was what he’d told her—shouted at her, in a voice she’d never heard from him before—that terrible night before he’d marched out, gone into the ring, and failed to walk back out.
He’d been very clear.
He had never expected or wanted to get married, but he had made an exception for her. He’d fallen crazy in love and he’d done his best to adjust to that. He was trying, he’d told her, as if she was that hard to love.
But children were a step too far. A baby was the worst thing that could possibly happen to him.
I would rather be dead than become a piece of crap father like mine, Ty had told her.
Then, as far she could tell, he’d done his best to prove it.