Forsaken

She is brave, selfless, and I swear I fall more in love with her in this moment than in the moment before. Everything inside me wants to protect her, but she’s right. When I gave her that clue, I already took her to a new place in this story. I pull my computer from my suitcase and clear the table to power it up, pulling up images of a small cemetery in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

“A cemetery,” Gia murmurs.

“Yes,” I say. “This cemetery is in a small town; it literally sits in the middle of a cluster of houses in a middle-class residential neighborhood.” I enlarge a specific gravesite. “I buried it there.”

She blinks and reads the tombstone. “Doc Holliday?” She gives me an incredulous look. “You buried it with Doc Holliday?”

“My father and I loved the movie Tombstone, and we went to the gravesite during a road trip years ago.”

She shakes her head and then starts laughing. “You’re crazy. I’m with a crazy man. No one else would think of this.”

I lie her down on the bed and rest my arms by her head. “I have a lot of Doc Holliday in me, sweetheart, and he’s a wild card.”

“I guess I’m in love with a wild card, then.”

“Well, then, as Doc Holliday, or rather, Val Kilmer, said in Tombstone, ‘I’m your Huckleberry, baby.’ ” And I fully intend to turn the laughter that is her response into a sigh.

The End—but stay tuned!