It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I left Uncle Zeke’s office, and things are moving at warp speed. My luck being what it is, according to Uncle Jonah he’s somehow managed to talk Violet into this insane plan. To hear him tell it, she’s on board and will be living here at the farm in Harmony with me now, as my wife. Yesterday, I didn’t even know where she was or what she was doing, and today she’s coming home.
At any moment the traitor I once loved more than anyone else in the world will come back into my life, and it’s messing with my head.
I’m jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof waitin’ for Uncle Jonah to arrive with her, and it’s pissing me off. Why am I nervous about seeing her? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? After all, she’s the traitor who left the ring I gave her, along with a Dear John letter, propped up on my kitchen counter before she hightailed it right the hell out of the South and disappeared off the face of the earth. That letter is my Achilles heel and I’ve read the damn thing so many times that I don’t even have to look at it to recall every word.
Ryder,
I’ll always love you, but I can’t marry you. We just aren’t meant to be together forever. Please don’t come after me. You need to accept this and go on with your life, without me. Find happiness, Ry. You deserve it more than anyone else in the world. I’m sorry. –Violet
Of course I went after her. Violet was my entire life—she had been since we were kids. I love—dammit, I mean I loved—Violet because she’s a part of my very soul. I never envisioned, nor did I want, any kind of a future where she wasn’t by my side. We shared everything with each other. First kiss, first love, first time. I believed in our forever. At first, even the letter didn’t change my belief that we were meant to be together. I thought it was a bump in the road. A case of pre-wedding jitters. Her grandfather had no idea where she was and, in a surprise to absolutely no one, her mother was no help at all. I knew Violet wasn’t at her mother’s house in New York City because I showed up there enough to be certain of that, but that was all I knew.
I spent a ridiculous amount of money and took a hell of a lot of time off from the ranch driving to New York trying to locate her, but I came up empty handed. After two weeks of looking high and low and not finding her, I finally had to admit defeat and accept the truth for two reasons. First, I’m not a millionaire and I didn’t have the money or the time to drive all over hell’s half acre searching for someone who didn’t want to be found. Second, I had to admit Violet didn’t want to be my wife, had to accept she didn’t love me the way that I loved her. If she really loved me at all, I’d have rated higher than a Dear John letter. I didn’t understand then, and I still don’t understand now.
I’ve known Violet forever, and losing her was like losing a limb. Even when we were kids, I knew that she was important. Back then, Violet, her older brother Dustin and their younger sister Daisy spent every summer at their grandfathers ranch, and for almost the entire time Vi and I were in high school, they lived there full-time because their dad was ill and there was worry about their safety being around him. About a year after he died, Vi’s momma took Dustin and Daisy back to New York with her, but allowed Vi to finish out high school here.
It was inevitable I would be close to the Hammond kids, and Violet in particular, because we’re the same age. In addition to our granddaddies being best friends, her family ranch and my family ranch share a border. We were destined to be in each other’s lives, but we took that closeness to another level. At least I thought we had.
I can’t remember the first time that I ever saw Violet, we were just babies, but I’ll never forget making love with her for the very first time on a blanket underneath our tree, the sunshine warming our skin as we took what I thought was our first big step to forever. Five years later, we took another big step when I dropped down on one knee under the same tree and asked her to marry me. It physically pains me to remember that moment, because there was absolutely no hesitation. She said yes before I had the question all the way out, and she cried tears of joy for hours. When I asked Violet to be my wife, we were just twenty years old. I did it during the summer between her sophomore and junior year at college, and we decided to wait until Vi graduated to tie the knot.
It sucked having her at college in New York City, but we got through it. A lot of people have problems with long-distance relationships, but Vi and I knew the drill from the times she lived with her momma instead of being on the farm. As opposed to growing apart, we always seemed to get even closer because we worked harder at it and valued the time we had together more. At least… it felt like we had. Now, I question how true it all was.
Violet changed during her final year of college, although not toward me. If anything, she had needed me more than ever. It all started when Vi’s older brother, Dustin, committed suicide. He did it while their momma, Greta, and her husband James, were on vacation in Europe. Dustin went to their apartment on the Upper West Side and hung himself. Violet’s little sister, Daisy, was the one to find him. Of course after she called the police, she called her big sister, and Vi went runnin’. She told me later they were in the process of taking Dustin’s body down when she got there, but she still saw everything.
Vi is one of the strongest people I’ve ever known, but she crumbled emotionally from the shock of seeing her brother like that. The hours it took for me to get on a flight and travel to New York ripped me apart inside because I knew my girl was falling apart. As soon as I got there, she attached herself to me and made me tell her, over and over again, we would make it through together, no matter what. I’d never seen her in such a state, not even when her daddy had killed himself. In fact, when he went, Vi was surprisingly calm about it—although I guess that makes sense seein’ as how he had tried more than a half dozen times before.
After Dustin’s funeral, Vi’s emotions seemed to be stabilizing, but then things got worse again when Daisy up and left home at eighteen. Just got up and left with her skeezy club-promoter boyfriend. She dropped her little ass right out of school and moved out like it was nothin’. Vi was beside herself, and I didn’t blame her one bit. I love Daisy like a little sister, and her leaving with some scumbag didn’t sit well with me at all.
I spent just about every other weekend flying to New York City that year because Vi needed me with her, but just like every other situation we’d ever been through, it brought us closer together. Or, it did…until things went to shit five days before our wedding and she left me. Yeah, she’d been actin’ high-strung, but it wasn’t anything horrible. We went from planning for a tiny wedding with just the people closest to us to planning a wedding with two hundred guests. Vi was definitely feeling the pressure from Greta, who wanted some type of royal wedding for her daughter, even though Vi is country through-and-through and had only ever wanted the simplest of ceremonies.
Some couples would have fought about the big change in plans, but not Vi and I. The two of us were always on the same page, and if planning a big wedding made her feel closer to her momma, then so be it. The only thing that has ever mattered to me is Violet’s happiness, and the wedding was no different.
Aside from wedding planning, the biggest stressor for her was the distance between us while she was at school for those eight months after Dustin passed. Once she got home, you could almost see the weight lifting off of her shoulders. I truly thought being home for good was makin’ her happy, but when her momma rolled into town to help with the final wedding preparations, Vi got all keyed up again.
Still, I didn’t get upset because I figured her momma was puttin’ wedding pressure on her. To be blunt, Greta isn’t my biggest fan. She’s always said I’m nothing but a middle-class cowboy who isn’t good enough for her daughter. It hurt the first dozen times she said it, until Uncle Jonah explained to me that Greta didn’t hate me, she hates the town of Harmony and everything it represents.
Greta is a city girl who married a country boy with mental problems. She truly believes living in, “bum-ass nowhere” made Jonah Jr. crazy, and she didn’t want her children to choose a life in the country. It never mattered what Greta’s prejudices were because Violet was always adamant the life her momma wanted for her wasn’t the life she herself wanted.
Her runaway bride act told me being a rancher’s wife wasn’t really what she wanted after all.
The whole thing is fucked up, and I’m not looking forward to her arrival. In ten days, we’re to be married down at the courthouse. She’s not even here yet, and I’m already steeling myself to be left at the altar again. I wish I’d managed to forget, to change, the way I feel about her, but so far, I haven’t had any success.
The truth is my memories of Violet aren’t just in my head, they’re in my heart. I can drink until I fall down and black out—trust me, I’ve done it—but I can’t make my heart forget its mate is gone. My heart is a stupid, stubborn son-of-a-bitch and it wants its other half back.