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And that kiss…
I rolled to my side and buried my face in the pillow.
“Nope,” I muttered into the fabric. “We are not doing this.”
I had not come to Blackwood, Montana, to develop a crush on the first cowboy who could derail my entire cardiovascular system by saying my name. I had come here because my car betrayed me and my life imploded, and California was allegedly westward.
That was the plan…escape first, develop unhealthy attractions never.
My body had not gotten the memo.
Every cell felt restless, humming, like I was standing too close to the edge of something. A cliff, maybe. Or a choice.
My ex had told me many times that I was irrational.
My feelings about Sterling Hayes made me believe that.
Every part of me wanted him, and every part of me knew I shouldn’t.
“I need to stay in this room today and not speak to anyone,” I told the ceiling, even though I knew that was not something I could do.
Responsibility, unfortunately, had other plans.
I dragged myself out of bed and got dressed, pulling on the least offensive combination of clothes I owned and hoping that counted as effort. It felt like armor in the loosest sense—thin, questionable, but better than nothing.
By the time I stepped into the Historical Society, the same paper-stuffed chaos greeted me, unchanged and unapologetic.
Albert peered at me from behind a leaning tower of newspapers. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “You showed up.”
“I said I would,” I replied.
He grunted, apparently satisfied with that, then reached into a pile and yanked out a thick, worn file, the edges soft with age. “Then you can start with this,” he said, shoving it into my hands.
I looked down at it. The tab was faded, the ink smudged, but I could just make out the date. Twenty years ago.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Unfinished,” Albert said simply, already settling back into his chair. “Been sitting there too long.”
“That’s…not very specific.”
He cracked one eye open. “Sort it,” he said. “Keep everything in that year. Put it in order by month. If anything’s missing, you make a note of it.”
I glanced down at the thick stack of papers. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he said, already closing his eyes again. “If it doesn’t make sense when you’re done, you did it wrong.”
I lowered myself into the other chair, the legs wobbling slightly under me, and flipped the file open. Paper slid against paper, brittle with age. Old reports. Newspaper clippings. Handwritten notes in different inks, some neat, some rushed, as if whoever had written them had been trying to keep up with something that refused to slow down.
I started sorting automatically, stacking pages into rough months based on the dates.
January. February. March—
A photograph slipped loose from the stack and drifted down, landing face up on the desk.
At first, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. My brain caught on the edges—the trees, the dirt, the shape of a body—before everything else came into focus.
Someone had clearly arranged the body I was staring at. He lay on the forest floor with his arms folded neatly over his chest and his fingers laced together in a way that felt almost peaceful at a glance.
