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“College?” I guessed.
“Yes.” His mouth flattened briefly, then eased. “I got a scholarship to Columbia.”
I blinked. “You—Columbia?”
His brow lifted.
“Oh! No, I didn’t mean it like you don’t seem smart,” I sputtered, waving my hands. “You just—I mean—the boots. The whole…cowboy situation. You’re not giving the I wrote my thesis in a library tower vibe.”
“Thank you,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’d hate for anyone to mistake me for a man who alphabetizes his bookshelf.”
A laugh slipped out of me, unexpected, and a little wild. “Yeah, no. You don’t scream Dewey Decimal System.”
His eyes warmed at the sound of my laugh, like he’d been waiting to hear it.
“So, why’d you come back?” I asked. “Were you homesick? You couldn’t live without the smell of manure and all the guys out there in bedazzled belt buckles compensating for…something?”
Another smile tugged at his mouth, and I inwardly congratulated myself because I was getting so many of them.
His gaze drifted to the fairgrounds below, though, and the smile faded and was replaced by something heavier. A shadow moved through his expression, like he was looking at the past instead of the present. “No,” he murmured. “I came back because this place…” His throat worked once. “Didn’t let me go.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
The muscle in his jaw ticked. “People talk like you can reinvent yourself if you go far enough,” he murmured. “Like distance cures whatever’s wrong.”
I let out a quiet breath. “Yeah,” I said. “People like to believe that.”
His eyes flicked downward, catching the lights and turning them colder. “But the thing I was trying to escape…wasn’t out there.” He tapped his chest once, barely. “It was in here. And it doesn’t travel well.”
The way he said escape made something cold brush the back of my neck.
“You mean…running the ranch?” I asked.
A weary breath escaped him. “My mom died when I was a kid,” he said. “After that, it was just me and my dad…figuring things out the hard way.”
Something in my chest tightened at that, the casual way he said it, making it land harder.
His hand flexed once against the safety bar, the tendons shifting beneath his skin. “Let’s just say, I always thought the worst parts of me came from this town. From what I learned here. From what I grew up around.” He shook his head. “But when I left? I found out those pieces weren’t Blackwood’s. They were mine. I carried them with me. So there was no use staying in a place I hated after that.”
I swallowed. “So you came home.”
“Yeah.” He looked at me fully, his expression unreadable. “My dad died, and I came back to the only place where I understand what I’m supposed to be.”
The picture took shape all at once—his mom gone when he was a kid, his dad after that, nothing left but this town and whatever it had made him into. And for a fleeting second, it felt familiar in a way I didn’t want to examine too closely.
Not the way he’d lost them or the finality of it. But the absence that came after. It hollowed things out and left you moving through your own life, trying to figure out where you belonged once everything that anchored you was gone.
My parents were still alive, but they might as well not have been as far as our relationship was concerned…not after all that had happened with David.
Something in his voice lingered, threading through everything he’d said in a way I couldn’t ignore. It didn’t feel like he was talking about duty, or the ranch, or whatever cowboy legacy he’d been born into.
It felt…deeper. Like he was brushing against something with darker edges.
I forced myself to breathe, to let it go. I was overthinking. Trauma had a way of turning ordinary sentences into shadows. Of making danger where there wasn’t any.
“Do you ever think you made a mistake in not staying there?” I asked.
“No,” he said without hesitation. “New York wasn’t built for someone like me.”
