The first twenty minutes or so after Adler left the office, Sage didn’t move from the seat. She didn’t slump. She barely blinked. Her hands remained fastened around the armrests, her feet stayed locked side-by-side.

The trance was broken when her gaze focused on the monitor, noted the time and she realized that Adler would soon reach the ranch where Jake worked. Mechanically, emotions as numb as when she had cared for her mother during the woman’s final days, Sage pulled out her phone and tapped a quick warning to her brother.

I screwed up. Adler doesn’t know about SS, but he is headed your way for answers.

At eight, she had tagged her father as Simply Steve without knowing he was her father. He never revealed his last name on his rare visits, neither did her mother.

She had been twelve and a half when she discovered his identity and that he was married. Her seventh-grade teacher had the class watch a Senate session on television and there he was, the man who was her mother’s drug. It took another year to work up the nerve to ask if the senator was her father and Jake’s.

Six more years would pass before she told her brother everything she knew. Shortly afterward, newspapers across the country plastered the sordid details across the front page for a few days. Reporters stalked Sage on campus and waited outside Jake’s high school.

Sage had told Adler that Jake ruined everything, but it wasn’t what she meant. She knew she had ruined it by telling Jake. It had been easier for her to slide through school fatherless. She focused on academics. The kids in chess club didn’t care if “unknown” filled any blanks on her birth certificate. In turn, she avoided things like cheer squad.

Jake had joined the football team, his natural talent a threat to the varsity quarterback. Rumors were spread, things often got physical and, after being called a bastard a hundred plus times on the field, in practice and in the locker room, Jake had hit back with his fist—and the truth.

Thrown off the team, he barely made it the rest of the way through high school. He didn’t care to go to community college after the tentative football scholarship offers from several universities were withdrawn.

He began to drift and then he dropped off the grid altogether.

Would it happen again, her words once more the catalyst?

With no reply from the text, Sage opened up the computer’s word processor and typed a simple letter of resignation. Next, she wrote out a check returning the five thousand dollars that had already cleared her account.

Easy come, easy go. Between her bank balance and her credit cards, she had enough to get back to Baltimore and survive a couple of months while she resumed the hunt for her next client or agency job. She hadn’t yet given her landlord notice on the studio apartment.

Stuffing everything in an envelope, she went next door to Adler’s office and placed the envelope and car keys in the center of his desk.

It was only after she returned to her office and sat on the love seat that she wondered how she would get back to town and where she could stay for the night. Then there was getting to Billings for the flight home.

Home—the word sank its sharp hooks into her chest. For the longest time, Baltimore had been nothing more than a place. Dangerous and dirty, no family, only loose acquaintances beyond one stalwart neighbor.

In the span of two weeks, Willow Gap had grown in her mind as someplace she could stay forever and be happy.

Resting her head against the wall, she closed her eyes but didn’t sleep. Ears attuned to the slightest sound, she heard two pairs of boots traveling down the hall, their steps increasing in volume.

She opened her eyes and Jake stepped into the office. The other pair of boots continued down the hall and into the next room.

Their movements as coordinated as synchronized swimmers, Jake shut the door as Adler shut his.

“Leah said you were tired.”

They both knew that was a lie. Sage shrugged.

“Did you get my text?” she asked.

“Yeah, gave me enough time to tell the boss I had to clock out and meet Adler at the gate.”

Sage looked Jake over. Despite the fair colored skin they both had, he had a deep tan that kept her from gauging whether his face was flush with emotion. The only real hint of his feelings was the subdued voice and the set of his shoulders. After so many years apart and the fact he was only entering manhood when he left Sage before, she didn’t know how to read Jake any better than she could read Adler.

So far, she only knew he’d seen the list of ideas because part of the paper poked from his pocket.

Cheeks flushing, she looked away, her voice no more than a whisper.

“Are things okay with Dawn’s family?”

Slowly, he took a seat next to her.

“I think so. Adler figures the only person I’ve wronged is you, sis.” He reached out his hand and covered hers. “And he’s right. I never should have broken away, never should have shut you out. You should have been at the wedding, Leah being born…the funeral.”

His voice cracked open. Sage turned to him, one arm wrapping around his chest, the other curling around his head to pull him to her as she had when he was little.

She didn’t hear him sob, but she felt a trace of moisture on her neck.

“It’ll be better going forward,” he whispered.

There was no uncertainty in his tone or words, but Sage felt the question inside her. Maybe his decision to cut her out had been the right one.

Despite the doubt, she stroked his head and murmured, “Of course it will.”

They sat like that for a few minutes, her holding him, both of them quiet. No sounds in the hall, no sounds from the room next door, everything caught in time except for her thoughts.

Jake eased himself from her embrace. A look she remembered from childhood when their mother would give him cough syrup flashed across his face.

“I need to come clean with Lindy. Everyone else will find out in due course, but I want her to hear it today.”

Sage bobbed her head in agreement, her bottom lip caught tight between her teeth, the edge of pain blotting her emotions so she could look at her brother.

“Adler told her to call Siobhan over and take Leah to the stables.” He cracked a wry smile. “Do you want to join either expedition? I’m sure Leah could spend all day showing you the horses, especially Cannonball.”

She released a slow breath and shook her head. “I have some stuff to do here first. My first day wasn’t very productive.”

He smiled more broadly and bumped her shoulder. “Suit yourself, but I think they’d let it slide this time.”

Jake was holding something back, maybe just an admission that he was nervous about talking to his mother-in-law, maybe something more. Again, too much time had passed for her to read him accurately. But she was barely holding it together. She would be a dark cloud hanging over the stables or his talk with Lindy.

She patted his hand. “You’ll be fine. Lindy Turk loves you as more than just Leah’s father.”

He bobbed his head again, leaned over and kissed Sage’s cheek.

Standing up, he remembered something he wanted to tell her. “Hey, Adler said the offer for me to work here at the ranch is always open. So, maybe after I square it with Chandler, we’ll be able to carpool some days, or at least have lunch together.”

“Leah would love that,” she said.

Hiding behind Sage’s smile was the truth that her resignation waited on Adler’s desk, had likely been opened already. If he had one of those APPROVED stamps, the letter was probably colored over in blue ink.

Jake leaned in one last time, kissed her cheek then headed down the hall to find Lindy.

Sage returned to the desk that had been hers for all of half a day. She didn’t wake the computer or make any attempt to find something to keep her busy. She just stared at the wall and waited.

The door to Adler’s office opened after a few more minutes. She counted his steps, four long strides bringing him to her room’s threshold. Just as he had done that first time in Jake’s home, he hung back at the doorway.

“I’m willing to work in the stable offices like I offered this afternoon.” For a second, he glowered, his shoulders bunched up in another reminder of that first meeting. Then the wind went out of him and he took his first step inside the office.

Pulling out the envelope, its seal intact, he approached her desk, put it down and slowly pushed it toward her.

“I’m not willing to accept this. You work the month as contracted. You want to find a different job after that, fine. You want to stay on after that, you do it as you, not some LLC.”

He dropped the car keys on top of the envelope.

“And you’ll give me your driver’s license so I don’t have to jump through hoops with the insurance company. Agreed?”

She nodded. She could always write him another letter, another check. And a month was as good a period as any to figure out if she had broken any chance at calling Willow Gap home.

Adler turned to leave. She held him back, but only for a second.

“You don’t need to work from the stables.”

“Good,” he acknowledged and continued out the door.