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And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t need to know where I was going next.

EPILOGUE

STETSON

The first time I saw Molly in more than a decade, I had her son tucked under one arm like a sack of feed. That wasn’t how I would’ve planned it.

The kid had been halfway over the top rail of the arena fence when his boot slipped. I’d been twenty feet away checking the latch on one of the practice pens, and the scrape of rubber on metal got me moving in time to catch him around the middle before his head hit the dirt.

“I almost had it,” he said.

“The only thing you almost had was a concussion.”

He twisted around to look up at me. Couldn’t be more than nine, maybe ten. His dark hair stuck out from under a ball cap, and the dirt on his jeans told me the fence wasn’t the first bad decision he’d made that morning.

“Can you put me down?”

“I’m planning on it.” I set him on his feet. He looked straight at the fence again. “Don’t.”

“I just wanted to see the chute where the bulls come out.”

“The chute’s not going anywhere.”

A woman’s voice cut across the empty rodeo grounds. “Nolan!”

Everything in me stopped. I knew that voice before I turned around.

Molly came around the end of the arena at a run, one hand holding her jacket closed against the November wind and a set of keys clutched in the other. Her hair was longer than I remembered. She made it three more steps before she saw me. Then she stopped too.

She’d changed. So had I. But I could still see the girl who used to sit on the hood of my truck after football games and steal fries off my plate at the diner. Same brown eyes. Same little line between her eyebrows when she was deciding whether to be angry or worried. Right now she looked like both.

“Nolan. Come here.”

He went.

She ran her hands over his shoulders and checked his face, then looked at me. “What happened?”

“He climbed the fence.”

“I slipped,” Nolan said.

“You were supposed to wait in the truck while I found Mayor Nelson.”

“You were taking forever.”

Molly closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she was looking at me.

“Hi, Molly.” I’d had years to come up with something better. Apparently, that was all I had.

“Stetson.”

Nolan looked between us. “You know him, Mom?”

“We went to school together,” Molly said.

We’d done a hell of a lot more than go to school together, but her son didn’t need to know that.

Nolan studied me with new interest. “Are you a Kincaid? My mom says there are too many of you.”