Page 94 of Promised to the Cowboy

I look at Jacob. His jaw is trembling. His eyes are wet, and for once, he’s not turning his face away quickly enough to hide it. Maybe he can’t. Maybe, for the first time in years, he’s stopped trying.

Across the corner of the table, Ben reaches out and puts one weathered hand over Jacob’s forearm. No speech. No apology.

My father looks down at it.

The whole room waits.

He doesn’t pull away.

It’s not forgiveness. Not yet. So many years of hurt don’t heal over one supper, and I wouldn’t believe it if it did. There will be worse conversations. Old anger. New silences. Nights when one of them walks out before he says something he can’t take back.

But the wall has cracked.

I watch it happen.

Ben’s hand on Jacob’s arm. Jacob allowing it to remain. Ruth’s voice still echoing through Maggie, ordering two stubborn old men to stop wasting what little time they have left.

“Well,” Tom says eventually, because somebody has to risk breaking the silence, “we’d better warn the minister before he retires. When he hears there might be another wedding with a Sutton, a Voss, and probably a goat at the altar, he’s liable to pop his clogs.”

“There will not be a goat at my wedding,” Evie says.

Every head at the table turns toward her.

She freezes. The color rises slowly from her throat into her cheeks.

I stare at her.

She looks at me.

“I mean—hypothetically.”

“Of course,” Shay says solemnly.

“Any hypothetical wedding,” Delaney adds.

“Would be entirely goat-free,” Jenna finishes.

Tom looks offended. “This family has no respect for tradition.”

The laughter comes up all at once, watery and helpless and grateful. Max joins in because everybody else is doing it, slapping both hands against his tray. Maggie sits down hard and laughs into her napkin. Even Jacob makes a sound, rough and unfamiliar, while Ben’s hand remains on his arm.

Under the table, I find Evie’s hand again. She turns hers over and threads our fingers together.

I look down the length of the table. At my brothers. My cousins. The women who somehow found their way into this family and made it better. At Ben and Jacob, not reconciled but no longer entirely divided. At Maggie, who has held all of us together through births and deaths and every stubborn silence between.

At Evie. And at the small curve of our daughter beneath her dress.

This is what the land holds. Not gold. Not stones. Not anything Alexander Voss could pull out of the ground and put a price beside.

This table. These people. The woman beside me. The child growing between us. This is what we protect.

Evie leans close enough that her shoulder presses against mine. “You okay?”

I look at our joined hands. Then at my father, who’s finally looking back at his brother.

“Yeah,” I say. “I am.”

Chapter 23