4

Hannah’s shoulda, coulda, woulda list grew longer by the second.

She should have kept right on going when she left Cold River Ranch earlier. Instead of turning down into town and heading across the river, she could have driven right back over the mountains that separated Cold River from Colorado’s famous ski resorts. She could have made it halfway to St. Louis by now. Because there was no need to stay here. She already had her answer.

Ty didn’t remember her.

That meant he clearly also didn’t remember anything that had happened between them. She couldn’t decide if that was a great relief, because it meant he wasn’t ignoring his own son deliberately. Or if it made everything that much worse.

These are things you can worry over to your heart’s content back home in Georgia, she’d lectured herself. Sternly.

She absolutely had not looked in her rearview mirror as she’d driven herself away from him. But she went ahead and turned her truck toward cute little Cold River, not toward the interstate when she had the chance.

There was a Grand Hotel standing proud and pretty on one of the corners along Main Street, but it looked much too rich for Hannah’s blood. She kept driving until she found a cute, small bed-and-breakfast. It was tucked between a darling bookstore and a boutique gift shop that sold a selection of bold, big necklaces Hannah hadn’t known she’d wanted desperately her whole life, if the window display was anything to go by.

Not that she was here to shop in boutiques.

She told herself that if the bed-and-breakfast had a room, she would stay. And if it was full up, that was a sign that she needed to get out of here immediately. What she certainly didn’t need to do was meet Ty Everett for drinks in a bar.

If she knew anything in this life, it was the danger inherent in meeting Ty Everett anywhere.

But the bubbly woman behind the desk introduced herself as Katrina, and assured her that they did, indeed, have vacancies. And she led Hannah to a room set up over Main Street with a lovely bay window, so Hannah could look up, down, and all around the pretty postcard town and pretend the place wasn’t a wedge in her heart.

“Well?” Mama had asked when she’d called home. “Did you find him?”

Like the father of her child was a lost sock, hidden at the back of a very large dryer the size of Colorado.

“I found him.”

“I hope that’s not emotion I hear in your voice, Hannah Leigh. You’re not on a date. That’s the man who left you pregnant by the side of the road. Just about literally. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d ask you to remember that why you’re out there, hopefully not compounding the error.”

“I’m meeting him tonight,” Hannah had blurted out, because she had almost always been constitutionally incapable of holding back information from her mother, even when doing so would make her life easier.

Was she a glutton for punishment? Or an idiot?

How could she be a grown woman, a mother far removed from her rodeo queen days when Mama had acted as her chaperone, and still not know the answers to those questions?

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Mama had said, which was never true. Ever. “But I will tell you this. I’ve spent your entire life so far waiting for your daddy to wake up and do the right thing no matter the hush money his parents paid us. And guess what? It never happened. It’s never going to happen. Do you want to know why?”

Hannah had sighed. “Because you can’t trust a man.”

“Because you can’t trust a man,” Mama had agreed, like it was a hallelujah. “Men always lie. They’re no good and they’re simply made that way. I don’t even blame you, baby girl. But you need to be smart. You lost your crown because of that man. You lost your reputation because of that man. You lost respect, decency, and your good name. What else are you going to lose?”

Then she’d put down the phone so that Hannah would have to sit with that question instead of making cooing noises at Jack and making sure he was okay without her, which was why she’d called in the first place. Hannah had accepted that as the punishment she was due. Because the only thing Luanne had ever raised Hannah to do was not repeat her own mistakes.

Yet here they were.

Hannah liked to argue—in her own head, obviously, because there was no arguing with Mama when she’d worked up a head of steam, or really at all—that at least she was married. And not a teenager the way Luanne had been. But what good was a husband if he denied the marriage? Then went ahead and forgot about it either way? Was it better to be single than discarded when it all ended up the same, living in Aunt Bit’s back room, the talk of Sweet Myrtle all over again?

More questions Hannah should surely have been able to answer, yet couldn’t.

Instead, she’d sat there on the edge of the bed in her tidy room that smelled of gardenias, glaring at the cheerful blue-and-white bedspread, missing that familiar back room. And missing her baby so much it hurt. She scowled down at the bedspread rather than surrendering to the tears that threatened. It looked as if it had been quilted with love and skill by the sorts of women Hannah imagined lived in a place like this.

Women who were never fooled by smooth-talking cowboys who hid lies and temptation behind all that flirtatious patter. Women who held fast to their values, were clear on what they stood for, and never, ever squandered their good reputations on well-known bad boys who lived for nothing more than one more notch in their belts.

The kind of woman Hannah had been so certain she was. Because she’d always believed in her own virtue as if it was as much a part of her as, say, her leg. She’d never imagined that it was as fragile as a single choice. As delicate as a yes.

Cold River looked like the sort of too-perfect town that was populated entirely by good, solid, decent people who knew their worth, never said yes when they should have shouted no, and definitely never threw away everything they’d ever worked for because of some guy.

There was a part of Hannah that wanted to blow it up.

But that was hugely unproductive and wouldn’t help her any, even if she knew how to operate explosives, which she didn’t. So instead of getting her gunpowder and lead on, she’d gone back downstairs and out onto Main Street. Then she’d succumbed to the siren call of Capricorn Books next door. For hours.

She’d patted the huffy tabby cat who lived there, fat and outraged with its tail twitching. Then she’d lost herself in books, the way she hadn’t been able to do in a long while. Not since Jack was born. And not for a long time before that, with all her commitments to the rodeo. It reminded her of being sixteen in Sweet Myrtle and spending any free time when she wasn’t on a horse, in the library. She’d read anything and everything she could, and had dreamed of all the glorious, magical things she was going to do with her marvelous life.

She’d spent a handful of sweet hours in the used section of Capricorn Books, leafing through old comfort reads to make herself feel better. Then, when she was ready to go, she’d picked up a worthy-looking book on the opioid epidemic because she, by God, did not need to loll around in self-pity a moment more. She needed to remember that her life, though not quite what she’d expected it to be when she’d been sixteen with too many oversize daydreams in her head, was fine. Good, even. Especially in comparison to people with real problems.

“Now, tell me something,” the woman behind the counter said, with a big, warm, conspiratorial smile that instantly made Hannah feel happier than she was. As if the woman were her friend. “Why does someone who sat here reading all the good parts of three different Jane Austen novels want to walk out of here with this? Not that it’s a bad book. It’s terrific. But it’s not exactly the same mood.”

“I need a different mood.”

“If you’re looking for hopeful,” the woman said mildly, “a treatise on the evils of pharmaceutical companies is probably not your read.”

“I don’t believe in hope,” Hannah replied. “I believe in cold, hard facts.”

“Are they mutually exclusive?” the woman asked as she rang up the purchase, still smiling. “What I like about hope is that it takes the cold and the hard out of facts and lets them simply be … factual.”

Which, for some reason, felt like another sucker punch in a day full of them.

Hannah had found herself back in her cheerful room in the lovely bed-and-breakfast in this pretty, happy town, staring at the depressing book she didn’t want to read. She felt as out of place as the freaking book was. As obviously wrong, surrounded on all sides by all the curated rightness. The carefully preserved brick buildings. The tidy streets. The flowers everywhere.

Even the drive out to Ty’s family ranch and back had been like something out of a western movie. Those rolling fields beneath the summer sun with the impossible mountains soaring all around. Hannah’s own small town featured far more boarded-up windows, questionable convenience stores with grown men on small bikes milling about outside, and abandoned cars with plants growing out of them behind chain-link fences.

Here in Cold River, she was clearly the wrong sort of small-town girl. And worse, she was sure it showed. She might as well be an unkempt yard full of discarded engines and rusted farm implements staring out through the chain link.

Which was how she’d always felt growing up as that Luanne Monroe’s little girl with no daddy.

Putting on her rodeo queen face and acting the part had convinced her she could be someone else, all done up in curls and a smile. The kind of someone else who deserved a marvelous, big life and all those pretty daydreams no matter how scandalous her birth had been. Ty Everett had proved otherwise.

You can’t trust a man, a voice inside her chimed in, right on cue. And Hannah couldn’t tell anymore if it was Luanne in there, deep, or if it was her. If she’d become her mother in all the ways she’d always promised herself she wouldn’t. Ever.

She changed into something nicer, then changed back, because she didn’t want to send the wrong message. She certainly didn’t want Ty to imagine she’d dressed up for him, like the empty-headed groupie he clearly believed she was, something that would likely lay her out with breathless rage if she let it.

She didn’t let it. She poured her fury into her curling iron and her mascara instead. And she reminded herself that homicide would mean Jack was down two parents instead of one. She had no intention of abandoning her baby the way Ty had.

Hannah considered getting something to eat once it started to grow late, but she wasn’t hungry, because it turned out that all the times she’d eaten her feelings before, they had been the minor, inconsequential sort that were easily soothed with a pint of ice cream and three bags of chips.

Real heartbreak—true grief—made her crave nothing but more time to try to forget it.

Now she was standing in a bar with Ty when she, of all people, knew better. He was a clear path to sin and perdition. It was written right there on his beautiful face and sadly backed up by her own traitorous response to him. Even now.

And throwing back beer on an empty stomach—no matter how twisted up it was—was not the smartest thing Hannah ever done. But it was that or give in to the fury that charged around in her veins like fire. And burned dark enough to hint that maybe it was despair dressed up in those flames. She’d chosen the beer.

“I’m not hiding from anything,” Ty was saying now, and there was something stark on his face that got to her. When nothing about him should get to her. She couldn’t help being attracted to him, apparently, but was it really necessary that she feel for him? “My father died last fall. My brothers and I run the ranch now. More or less together.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

Ty shrugged, his gaze shuttered. “I should miss him more than I do, probably.”

Hannah could have said a whole lot of things on the subject of disappointing fathers, but she restrained herself. “You always said you would retire here.”

His dark green gaze sharpened. “Did I? We sat around talking about my retirement?”

She smiled faintly, because that would indeed be weird … if she were one of his groupies. She didn’t get the impression the cowboys did too much talking with the girls who chased them from town to town.

She would never know how she managed not to throw her beer at him for suggesting, however indirectly, that she was one of them. When she had been so good. So proper. So uptight when it was always clear everyone else was having more fun. And when she had only ever let her guard down once.

Ty had promised her he was worth it.

They all promised that, her mother would say. That was why there were so many painful songs about unreliable cowboys.

“You’re on the wrong side of thirty, Ty,” she said with admirable calm, not that she expected him to appreciate it. “You didn’t have much time left riding bulls. Not well, anyway.”

“You know a lot about riding bulls, do you?”

“Nothing personally, because I’m not suicidal. I’ve watched you ride a bull, if that’s what you mean. And experience goes a long way, but at a certain point, the risk of permanent injury outweighs the possibility of a win. You know that.”

“Didn’t we spend a whole lot of time establishing that I suffered a pretty big wallop to the head? Could be I think I’m invincible.”

“Do you?”

“You appear to know everything about me already. Including my retirement plans. Are you going to tell me why or are we going to keep playing these cute little guessing games?”

“I don’t have to know anything about you to know that your age was always going to be a factor in whether or not you get to stay in the ring. How are you supposed to compete against eighteen-year-olds?” Hannah shrugged as if the way he glowered at her didn’t register. “You can’t.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“You’re not the first person in the world who got aged out of the thing they loved. You’re unlikely to be the last. You should count yourself lucky that you have a family ranch as plan B. Not everyone can say the same.”

His green gaze glittered, dark and dangerous. “Are you talking about yourself now? Or are we still pretending you’re talking about me?”

Hannah hadn’t realized how close they’d gotten, standing there tucked up at the bar. She’d forgotten they were even at a bar. She’d been much too wrapped up in him, which was vying for the phrase most likely to end up on her tombstone.

“You definitely don’t know the first thing about me, Ty,” she said after a moment, fighting hard to make her pulse behave. And failing. “You said so yourself.”

“Well, darlin’, I don’t have to know you personally to figure out all kinds of things about you.”

“Have you suddenly become insightful about other people?” Her drawl was heavy and her tone was dry, and she wasn’t particularly inclined to change either. “That would sure be an exciting development.”

“You came looking for me, not the other way around.”

“I told you I was passing through. I thought I’d drop in on an old friend. See if you survived that bull after all.”

“All my old friends are sitting around the same tables right here in this saloon, still talking about what we wish we did in high school, but didn’t. That means I know you from the rodeo.”

“Everybody knows you from the rodeo. That’s the price of fame.”

“You’re sketchy on the details, Hannah, and it’s beginning to feel deliberate. Still, it’s clear you know me personally. Possibly biblically. And look at you.”

She didn’t know where he was going with this. She hated that she didn’t have the confidence she’d come to take for granted during her rodeo queen years. Before her body had changed so much, that was. Before she’d learned, in the most profound and beautiful way possible, what it could do—and had also had to face the fact that it would never look the way it had before.

Hannah did the best she could with what was left of that girl she’d been, but she hadn’t had the opportunity to test it.

Especially not where this man was concerned.

“You’ve got those curls,” Ty was saying, looking and sounding lazy again. “Rhinestones on the pockets of your jeans. Fancy patterns on your cowboy boots and that perfectly made-up face. All you’re missing is a cowboy hat with a shiny crown slapped on the front of it.”

“I keep that in the truck.”

“Amen.” He didn’t actually grin, but she could see the hint of it in his dark green gaze, and that was far more dangerous. “I can identify a rodeo queen when I see one.”

“Past tense,” Hannah drawled, as if it didn’t hurt. As if it wouldn’t always hurt. “My crown got a bit tarnished.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I bet you look good in a glittery crown.”

And nothing else, he’d used to tell her. The words hung there between them, as if he was thinking them now. She certainly was.

Because she was that ridiculous. That pathetic and sad.

Except … did it count as abandonment if he couldn’t remember what he’d left behind?

“Here’s what I know about rodeo queens,” Ty said, and he reached between them to pull one of her long, careful curls between his fingers, the way he’d done so many times. Hannah should have batted his hand away. But she didn’t. “Driven. Ambitious. Sweet at a glance and sharp to touch.”

“You shouldn’t go around touching rodeo queens. They’re not out there busting their butts for your entertainment.”

Everything about him was as lazy as that grin. “Are you sure about that?”

“A rodeo queen is an ambassador,” she told him primly, and pretended her heart wasn’t stuttering in her chest. “For the western way of life. They deserve respect, not cheap come-ons from drunken cowboys who are afraid to be alone because they might have to take a hard look at themselves in the mirror.”

“Now, darlin’,” Ty said, finally sounding outraged. Until he grinned again. “I like what I see in the mirror just fine.”

Hannah laughed before she could catch herself, and worse, leaned toward him, angling herself closer to that grin. It was instinctive. Natural, even.

And she hated herself for it.

What on earth was she doing here?

He was a flashback come to life, standing there before her as if nothing had happened. And that was the kicker, wasn’t it? None of it had happened. Not to him.

She was the one who should know better. She did know better. Hadn’t she already seen what happened when she let this man flirt with her? It had been bad enough when she was a rodeo queen finishing out one term and starting another. She’d had Luanne as a fierce and usually harsh chaperone and gatekeeper, but that hadn’t stopped Ty. More important, it hadn’t stopped her from sneaking out to see him and lying to her mother for the first time in her life.

It hadn’t stopped her from making every dire prediction her mother had ever uttered come true, because she’d been so sure that she was smarter and Ty was better and they were in love.

And now she had his baby. She missed his baby so much it was like a hollow behind her ribs. But he had no idea who she was.

He had no idea Jack existed.

Her response to seeing him again was to stand in a bar, like a moth to the same old flame, and make it that much worse.

She hated herself for this.

“I have to go,” she said. Abruptly.

Hannah turned in a rush, and didn’t realize that more people had come out to fill up the bar while she’d been entirely focused on Ty. The world could have ended and she wouldn’t have noticed, not when she had all of that dark green attention focused on her again.

Selfish, stupid girl. Her mother’s voice rang in her head, the way it had when she’d broken down and confessed everything after Ty’s bad fall and the scene in his hospital room. All you had to do was keep your legs closed.

Hannah felt bile, thick and acrid, at the back of her throat. She almost stumbled as she dodged around clumps of people with too much speculation all over their faces—and the only saving grace she could come up with was the fact she didn’t know a single one of them.

Though, had everything gone the way it had been supposed to when she’d married Ty, she might have. These people would have been her neighbors. They might even have become her friends.

She shoved her way out the heavy saloon doors and onto the street. The summer evening was burning itself out, hot and red. It felt like an omen.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, but she didn’t check it. Because she knew who it was. Who it always was. Luanne, who had never quite relinquished her role as Hannah’s chaperone, even after it was clear she’d failed in her primary mission. She was checking in. And more likely checking to see if Hannah had her clothes on.

If it was an emergency with the baby, she would call back instantly. Hannah took a breath while she waited. Then another breath, deeper than the one before.

But her mother didn’t call back. Likely because she was already imagining the worst. And Hannah might not have tossed her clothes off—yet—but that didn’t mean the worst hadn’t happened.

Ty didn’t remember her. Yet she was still in love with him.

There was nothing to do but stand there on a quiet, perfect street as the summer shadows grew into full dark and ask herself what she hoped to gain from flinging herself, face-first, into the irrevocable weight of what she’d lost and couldn’t have.

“You came all this way to see me and you’re running off without a goodbye?”

Ty’s drawl was a low insinuation against the night, but Hannah didn’t turn around to face him. Her eyes closed, and she wrapped her arms around her middle, though she couldn’t have said if she was trying to keep herself from swinging at him—or from doing something far more unforgivable.

Like burying her head in the crook of his neck.

“You don’t remember me either way,” she managed to say, evenly enough. “What does it matter to you if I say goodbye?”

“It matters.”

His voice was rougher than it should have been. And she couldn’t help herself. She turned, though her heart kicked at her and her stomach twisted into that knot she’d given up trying to unravel.

She should never have come here. This man was her weakness, and she couldn’t believe she’d imagined that that could change. She couldn’t believe she’d actually thought she’d grown up.

Because even now, even after everything he’d done and said that terrible night he got hurt, she looked at him and she melted.

The only difference was that now, that melting sensation came with a side helping of deep shame. Hannah wanted to kick herself. Or him. She wanted to knock their heads together, but she knew better. Touching him had only ever led to one place.

And then, eventually, straight on to right here.

“You look at me like I’m a ghost,” he said, closing the distance between them.

His dark green gaze was troubled. And God help her, but she wanted that to mean things it didn’t. It couldn’t.

“Maybe I’m the ghost,” she said quietly. “A hilariously ineffective one, if so.”

“I wouldn’t call you ineffective.”

“I shouldn’t have come here,” she said, and some of the distress she was feeling must have shown on her face, because his expression changed.

She recognized the way he looked at her, then. Hannah recognized it, and it made her want to cry, right there in front of him.

Because it turned out that there was something a lot worse than Ty Everett looking at her like he’d never seen her before. And that was him looking at her the way he used to. Like he cared when he didn’t.

“I need to go,” she said carefully. Because that wasn’t what she wanted. That was never what she’d wanted.

“I’m guessing you came to Cold River for a reason. You’ve done a good job of talking in circles all night. But you should probably tell me why you’re here.”

“I honestly don’t know if I should. You don’t remember me. So what good is calling on your memory?”

“Are you some buckle bunny, Hannah?”

“Of course not,” she retorted before she could help herself. Before she could think better of it. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

She expected him to do what he usually did. Hide the darker thing in his gaze behind that lazy grin of his, then say something provoking, so no one would see the real him lurking there behind all the flash.

But he didn’t. He looked … uncomfortable.

“It’s not you, personally, that I can’t remember.” His voice was stiff. Gruff. “I … I’m missing some time.”

She didn’t know why that struck her as hard as it did. When surely the way he’d looked at her with no recognition on the ranch should have hurt the most. Or the fact he could make jokes about buckle bunnies with her, when she’d given him her innocence. When he’d promised her he would cherish it, and her, forever. Surely those things should have flattened her.

But instead, it was this. Ty standing before her out here in the dark, proud, scowling, and stiff with discomfort. Talking about missing some time.

This was what made tears prick the back of her eyes, while something unwieldy lodged in her chest and made her throat ache. As if she was already lost in a sob.

“What do you mean by some time?” she asked.

“Near as I can figure, two years. Give or take.”

Two years. Meaning, the entire time he’d known her. All … gone. It was one thing to suspect it. It was something else to hear him confirm it, and Hannah wanted to do something. Scream. Cry. Beat on him a while. Hold him, maybe.

Rewind to the terrible night that March and … not tell him she was pregnant. Not have that horrible fight when he’d turned into someone she barely recognized. Not watch him storm out into the ring and get thrown the way he had.

But he couldn’t remember any of that. He didn’t know who she was.

Hannah had to swallow down the sob that threatened to pour out of her. Or become her. She had to keep it to herself.

She didn’t know how she managed it. “What does your doctor say? Are you going to get those years back?”

Ty aimed for that grin of his and didn’t quite make it. “I was lucky to walk again. Asking for perfect recall is pushing it.”

“Head injuries are tricky,” Hannah said slowly. “Or so I’ve read.”

“Sometimes the memories come back and sometimes they don’t. I know who I am. I know my family. I get up every morning and I can walk. I’m going to get back on that bull and things are going to end differently this time. I’m good.”

“I’m happy for you,” she made herself say, and she almost meant it. She really, truly, almost meant it. “You’re very lucky—”

“Hannah. Tell me.”

He took a step toward her and made as if to put his hand on her again. But he stopped. She didn’t know if that was because he could feel it too. That same electric spark that had always been there between them. Every time they looked at each other in those dusty, crowded rings. Every time. She’d been so sure she disliked him, at first.

She’d wanted so badly to dislike him.

But she hadn’t then. And, though it made her deeply ashamed, she didn’t now either.

It had never occurred to her that she might feel sorry for him. All that hurt and betrayal inside of her had nowhere to go. She felt swollen with it.

“This is a terrible idea,” she muttered, and she stepped back the way she should have done back then. The way she had, day after day, until that night she hadn’t.

“Please,” he said, a different kind of grittiness in his voice. “Tell me. What did I do to you?”

It had been one thing to imagine herself yelling at him. She’d wanted to yell at him. She’d staged confrontations in her mirror a thousand times, practicing for this moment.

You have a son, she would shout, bristling with self-righteousness. He’s adorable, he’s perfect, his name is Jack, and he deserves a father—even if it’s you.

She’d yelled it. She’d said it quietly, with great dignity or ringing condemnation. Every way there was to say it, she’d tried it out. But she’d never expected … this. Could she yell the truth at him when he didn’t remember anything about her? Could she use it as a weapon when he didn’t remember injuring her in the first place?

Was it even okay to tell him? She was sure she’d read something, somewhere, that confronting someone with memory problems was a bad idea. Possibly even damaging.

If it was a precarious medical situation, should she have come barreling in like this? She wasn’t sure he counted as a deadbeat dad when he didn’t know he had a child. And she could ask him for a divorce here and now, but he probably didn’t know he was married. He could have broken their marriage vows a thousand times already, a notion that made her ill, except … Did it count as breaking a vow if he couldn’t remember making any promises in the first place?

Hannah needed to regroup. She needed to think, and maybe cry some more. She had to consult a better medical authority than a Google search, and figure out what was best for everyone involved. And yes, she should have thought this all through before she’d kissed her baby goodbye, jumped in her truck, and come all the way out here. Much less confronted Ty.

But the real truth was, she hadn’t really expected him not to remember her.

His potential memory issues had been an excuse. On the off chance he couldn’t remember her, she’d driven for two days straight so she could put herself in front of him again. Because she’d expected that of course he would know her. And all she’d really wanted was a good excuse to turn up again all this time later.

To see if he’d really meant it when he’d told her to leave him the hell alone.

Now she had no idea what to do. It was easier to hate him from afar.

Jack comes first, she told herself now, past the ache and the confusion. Jack has to come first.

“You didn’t do anything to me,” she forced herself to say, though the words came out wrong. They sounded too plaintive. Too much like the lie they were. “Not on purpose. After all, a famous bull rider can’t be expected to remember every groupie who comes along, can he?”

She didn’t know why she said that. The real problem was that she didn’t know what she was doing, but at least that was familiar ground. With Ty, she never had.

“The thing about groupies and buckle bunnies, Hannah, is that they’re mostly in it for the buckle. They don’t show up a year later, no rodeo in sight, no cheering crowds, and no prize money. They follow the rodeo, not the rider.”

“It’s late,” she said, her voice still much too … wispy. “I have to go.”

“It’s not even ten o’clock.”

“Good night, Ty,” she said, and then she turned around again because looking at him was too hard. She started down the sidewalk because her bed-and-breakfast was on the next block. She wanted to barricade herself in her pretty bedroom, curl up in a ball, and sob until she felt like herself again.

If that were even possible.

“Hannah,” he said. As if her name made him ache. “No one knows.”