Page 169 of Tessa and Nash

Not after Nash looked at me like loving me was the simplest truth he had ever spoken and the hardest one to survive.

“People are beginning to see reason,” Thomas continues as I grab a bowl of soup. “I knew they would.”

I lift my spoon and set it back down untouched. “People are gossiping.”

“In Buckhorn, those are often the same thing.”

I almost laugh, except nothing about this feels funny.

He watches me more closely now, curiosity sharpening his expression. “You don’t seem happy.”

I keep my face neutral. “Should I be?”

“Yes.” Thomas folds his hands in front of him, perfectly composed. “This is what we wanted. We needed time. We needed scrutiny. We needed that proposal slowed before it became a permanent problem.”

We.

The word makes my skin itch.

As if I am standing beside him in this fight. As if the past few weeks haven’t shifted something fundamental in me, and Nash is just a McCoy and not a man who carries too much alone, who jokes when he is afraid, who becomes most honest the moment he stops trying to perform.

I lower my eyes to the soup because it is safer than letting Thomas read my face.

“It doesn’t feel like a victory,” I say carefully.

He leans back slightly. “Why not?”

Because it hurt him… and me. And every time Buckhorn turns the feud into a clean story with heroes and villains, everyone moves farther from the truth.

I grip the spoon. “Because it feels uglier than that.”

Thomas’s expression cools by degrees.

“Disputes are ugly,” he says. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary.”

I look up. “Necessary for who?”

His jaw shifts. “For this family.”

I hold his gaze. “And what happens if the truth is more complicated than you want it to be?”

Silence drops between us.

The temperature in the room seems to change.

Thomas’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. “That’s an interesting question.”

My pulse quickens, but I keep my face still. “It’s a fair one.”

“Fairness,” he says, “is usually the word people use when they want to renegotiate an advantage.”

I let that sit there.

Then, apparently abandoning every instinct for self-preservation, I say, “Or when they’re tired of pretending the past was cleaner than it was.”

His expression goes flat.

Neither of us moves.