Page 34 of Promised to the Cowboy

Jacob lets out a breath so quietly I almost miss it.

“The doctor wants another scan in a few weeks,” I add. “Just because of my history. They said it’s routine.”

He nods. “Good.” His thumb brushes absently over the edge of the photograph. “You tell them everything. About your surgeries. The hole in your heart. Don’t let them miss anything.”

I look at Evie. “We won’t.”

Another silence settles.

“I remember every one of those surgeries,” Jacob says quietly.

He isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s looking somewhere thirty years behind me.

“You were so little.” His voice catches before he clears it. “I’d stand outside those operating rooms wishing there was some way to trade places with you.”

My chest tightens.

The room seems to tilt.

Why is he telling me this now?

“There wasn’t,” I say roughly.

He gives a single shake of his head. “No.”

His eyes finally meet mine. “But there isn’t a day I’ve stopped wishing.”

The words hang in the kitchen.

I don’t know what to do with them.

I’ve spent thirty years doing the math on my father.

One sentence, and every answer I’ve ever come up with suddenly adds up wrong.

Before I can find an answer, Ethan clears his throat. “Fifty-fifty shot she’s gonna have your eyes,” he says, looking at me with that infuriating ability he has to find the soft spot every time. “One blue, one green.”

I frown. “Ethan?—”

“Mom’s green.” He smiles wistfully. “Can you imagine? She’d have lost her mind over this.”

The kitchen stills.

Mom.

We don’t throw that word around much in this house.

“A granddaughter,” Ethan says quietly.

I stare at the floor. All my life I’ve only ever turned it one way.

The trade.

Her life for mine.

I’ve spent my whole life silently apologizing to a woman who never got the chance to hear me.

It has never once occurred to me that maybe she would’ve wanted this. Wanted me to live long enough to stand in my own kitchen, holding the hand of the woman carrying her granddaughter.