Page 16 of Forbidden Rancher's Return
I follow his gaze.
Tire tracks. Fresh. Running parallel to the fence line in the mud, close enough that whoever drove them could have watched us from thirty feet away.
My stomach is dropping.
"Halford," Rowan says.
I look at the tracks. At the distance. At the clear view of two people who forgot the world existed for thirty seconds.
Rowan's hand finds mine. Squeezes once.
"We should go inside."
But I don't move. Because the part that scares me isn't Halford seeing us.
It's that I don't care that he did.
Calla
The rain eases by the time I reach the tree line.
The pasture behind me looks scrubbed clean. The ridge ahead looks the same as it always does. Which is a lie the mountain tells well.
The stream is louder after storms. It runs fast over stone, cold and insistent, like it's trying to wear the past smooth.
It never does.
My boots sink at the bank. Mud grips and releases with every step.
This is where I always stop.
The oak sits on the left bend where the water widens. Its roots curl into the bank like knuckles. The bark is dark from rain, and the old carving sits at chest height. A wound the tree healed around but never erased.
C + R.
Crooked. Too deep for a boy's knife. Too permanent for a girl's dare.
Below it, if you know where to look, there's another mark. Smaller. Older.
The tally we kept one summer of who caught more crawdads from the pool below the bend. I won. He never admitted it.
Before we were anything else, we were this. Two kids on the same ridge who didn't know yet that best friends could become something that wrecks you.
I lift my hand and trace the groove with my thumb.
My throat tightens. I swallow it back.
I don't come here to cry. I come here to remember who I was before grief, before inheritance, before the town decided my life was something they had a right to comment on.
I come here to remind myself that I survived everything that happened at this bank.
A rock shifts behind me.
Not loud. Not careless. The kind of sound a man makes when he wants you to know he's there.
I don't turn.
"You always come here."
