Page 49 of More Than This Land

Without the consulting project, she had to decide what happened next.

Claire pressed her palm flat against the dining room table, the wood cool and solid under her hand.

The plan had always been Billings. She’d had job alerts running since February. Three serious inquiries she hadn’t responded to, which she’d told herself was because she was too busy with the Calloway project.

The door opened and Ruth came in with a container of leftovers and an expression that suggested this visit was not about the food. “For you and Mae.” She set it on the table, then sat in the nearest chair.

“Ruth. Please.” Even she didn’t know what the please was for. Please don’t send her away, maybe. Please tell Luke she was sorry. She should do that herself. Please tell her it was all going to be okay. She needed that one, needed someone to physically tell her that no matter what happened, she would be okay.

“I’m not going to say much.” Ruth folded her hands. “I just want you to know that whatever you’re holding in your hand right now, whatever that piece of paper represents to you, it’s not the end of anything unless you decide it is.”

“It’s a check.” Claire turned it in her fingers. “It’s the end of all this.”

“It’s a piece of paper, and you’re a woman who knows the difference between what things are and what they mean.”

“He didn’t ask me to stay.”

“He did.” Ruth’s eyes held hers. “You just weren’t ready to hear it.”

After Ruth left, Claire stood in the quiet dining room and looked out the window at the south pasture where cattle grazed in patterns that Luke had probably mapped out months ago. The land rolled toward the mountains under an impossibly long, blue sky. A hawk circled above the fence line, patient and unhurried.

Agnes Pruitt’s voice in her head saying the cost of refusing to love is lonelier than the cost of loving and losing pushed her shoulders up to her ears.

I won’t start something I can’t see through—the memory closed her eyes. Would she ever not hear Luke’s voice? Would she ever not experience pain when she realized what she might be walking away from? Her fingers tightened on the envelope until the paper crinkled.

Her reason for being here, the scaffolding she’d built permission out of, had been removed with efficiency and grace in a dining room full of people who had thanked her and meant it.

What remained was a question she’d been circling for weeks, waiting for her to be brave enough to look at it directly.

Did she want to stay?

Did she want this? Family dinners and county auctions and small-town rhythms and the possible love of a man who made a decision and stuck with it.

Did she want him?

She picked up the container Ruth had left and walked through the kitchen where Noah washed dishes and Caleb dried them.

Their argument about fence posts had apparently gained traction as their voices competed for space and grew louder with every sentence. Ruth stood at the stove. Wade stood behind her, his arms around her waist and his chin on her shoulder. They ignored their children and swayed side to side.

“Thank you for lunch.” Claire’s voice carried to the whole room, but she aimed the sentiment at Ruth. “For everything.”

Ruth dried her hands on a dish towel and pulled Claire into a firm, deliberate hug. “Come back and see us.”

Claire drove down the long ranch driveway with the check on the passenger seat and the container of food on the floor. At the gate, she stopped, put the car in park, and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.

In the rearview mirror, the main house stood sentinel. Somewhere behind one of those windows, Luke Calloway was doing whatever he did while being careful and controlled and quietly, devastatingly present in that way of his that had gotten under her skin. He stuck fast, like a thorn hooked in her heart and refusing to budge.

She put the car in drive but couldn’t quite make herself look away from the mirror until the gate disappeared around the first curve in the road.

Chapter Thirteen

Haven Ridge Baptist Church on a Wednesday night looked different from Sunday morning. It wasn’t just that fewer people came, but that it had a more relaxed feel to it for reasons Luke had never understood. Coming to church to worship always required the same energy for him, but he kept his thoughts bound tight as he joined everyone else in the sanctuary.

They always had a little snack and chat after service for those who were not ready to head home. Luke had never stayed. Too much to take care of at the ranch before bed.

But tonight, a longing pulsed through him. A need for the community he loved so dearly.

He’d been coming to midweek prayer meeting since he was old enough to drive himself. It had never felt like an obligation. His grandfather had called it the most honest hour of the week, a time for people to gather to talk to God and each other. Luke thought he’d understood that, but based on the tightening in his gut, he’d let it become a kind of obligation that he fulfilled instead of something that satisfied his soul.