Page 1 of Wild Sanctuary

1

DAISY

The “Welcome to Blackstone Creek” sign still has a bullet hole through the o, same as it did the last time I drove past it. There’s a part of me that’s comforted by the idea that some things in Montana never change.

My Honda Civic groans as I turn off the highway onto the county road, protesting three days of hard driving from Denver. The check engine light came on somewhere in Wyoming, but I’ve decided it’s a vibe.

My therapist would have a lot to say about that.

The mountains on either side of the road feel like old friends who aren’t sure they want to welcome me yet. I’d forgotten how the Rockies feel different here than they do in Colorado. Wilder almost. Less tamed by ski resorts and hiking influencers with their matching Patagonia jackets.

I crack the window despite the chill and let the cold pour in, the scent of pine and distant rain filling my small car. I make it about a mile before my eyes start to sting, and for a second, I can just about hear my dad telling me I’m being dramatic.

And you’d be right, Dad.

My stomach dips as I pass the old Miller place. The fence posts are gray and splintered, every one of them leaning toward the dirt. The cattle are long gone, and the barn roof has collapsed on one side. Plywood covers every window of the sprawling main house where I went to birthday parties every summer, where Mrs. Miller’s kitchen smelled of fresh apple pie and there were always too many children and never enough chairs.

I haven’t been back in three years, and the town where I spent my summers is dying.

I press the gas pedal even harder but it doesn’t help. The Holburn place slides past, sold to developers who never broke ground, followed by the Coopers’ spread, now sitting empty.

My phone vibrates in the cupholder and I don’t so much as glance toward it. It’s either my editor, my mother, or my ex, and not one of them has anything I need to hear right now.

Just then, the GPS pipes up from the dashboard, “In half a mile, turn right onto Glacier Ridge Road.”

Not that I actually need directions to Glacier Ridge Ranch. I spent every summer there from age six to twenty, back when my parents’ separation meant I got shipped off to Montana for two glorious months to stay with my dad.

In those days, I’d have sold a kidney for one ungrudging word of approval from Wyatt Hartley, a man once like family, now a stranger.

I learned to ride horses here, on a patient mare called Taffy. Drove stick for the first time in Wyatt’s truck, jerking through the gears hard enough to give us both whiplash. My father—the ranch’s foreman and Bill Hartley’s best friend—considered the Hartleys more family than most of our blood, and taught me that love could be loud and messy and still last.

I learned how to grieve here, too. Three years ago, I came back for the first time since I was twenty. But it wasn’t for a summer visit or a holiday dinner. That last time was for a funeral.

I stood in a black suit that didn’t fit properly across the shoulders, and my heels sank into cemetery mud as I tried to accept the fact that they were both gone.

That my dad, Tom Monroe, and Bill Hartley were stolen from us in a single, terrible moment.

Two men. One accident. Too many questions.

An icy road? Poor visibility? Maybe a curve taken too fast? The sheriff called it an accident and the case was closed within the week.

The ranch gates appear around the bend, massive timber posts that have stood for over a century, with a wrought-iron Glacier Ridge Ranch sign that’s weathered to a deep black suspended between them.

I pull through and stop, letting the engine idle while I take it in.

The valley opens up ahead of me, thirty thousand acres of cattle land and horse pastures rolling toward the mountains. The grass is that particular shade of green that only exists in Montana in late spring, rippling when the wind moves through.

The main house sits atop a sloping hill. It’s a large, old two-story, the cedar siding now weathered to silvery gray, with a porch that wraps around the entire house.

Along the south side, a garden stretches behind a low picket fence, roses and lavender and something tall and purple I can’t name from the car. It looks well-tended. Someone’s been keeping Jessamine Hartley’s garden alive long after her passing.

Behind the house, the original red barn lies front and center. To the left is the newer equipment barn, and on the right is the state-of-the-art training facility West, the youngest Hartley brother built for his horses.

In the near pasture, horses graze with their heads down, tails swishing at flies. Further out, cattle dot the hillside. A hawk rides the thermals overhead, and somewhere behind the main house a dog barks once, twice, then stops.

It looks exactly like I remember and nothing like it at all.

Or maybe that’s me.