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"Right," she says. "Not your call."

"You've got a shot at something big. I'm not gonna stand in the way of it."

"Nobody asked you to stand anywhere." Her voice climbs, sharp at the edges. "I asked you what you want."

"What I want doesn't matter."

"It matters to me!"

The radio keeps playing some cheerful country song. Sergeant gets up from the floor and goes to lean against her legs.

I've talked men down off ledges. I've walked into bars with fights breaking out and made the whole room go quiet. I've never raised my voice on the job, and I'm not gonna start now. I make it low and even.

"Three years ago, a man walked out on you three weeks before your wedding," I say. "I'm not gonna be another man who makes you choose between him and your life."

She stares at me. Her eyes fill up.

"You think that's what this is?" Her voice shakes. "He didn't make me choose, Josiah. He just didn't show up. Three weeks before the wedding he packed the dog's bed and walked out, and I spent the next three weeks calling every vendor I'd booked to cancel my own wedding. I still have the veil. I sewed the beads on myself." She swallows hard. "And now you're standing in my kitchen telling me you don't get a say. Same thing. It's the exact same thing."

"It's not."

"Then tell me you want me to stay."

I can't. The words stick behind my teeth. Fifteen years of making myself small enough to never want anything I couldn't keep, and they won't come out.

She waits. She gives me a long time, and I don't take it.

When she finally speaks her voice is flat and very tired.

"Go patrol something, Sheriff."

"Mona."

"Please." She turns back to the stove. "Just go."

I stand there another second. Her back is to me. Her shoulders shake once and go still. Every instinct I've got tells me to cross the room and put my arms around her, and I don't, because she told me to go and I've spent my whole life doing what I'm told.

I pick up my hat. I call Sergeant.

He doesn't come.

"Sergeant."

He looks at me. Then he lies down across her feet and puts his head on his paws.

It takes two more tries before he gets up. He walks to the door slow, head down, and he looks back at her the whole way out.

* * *

I sleep in my truck in the church lot. Or I don't sleep. At four I give up and turn the key.

Holloway Pass is black and empty before dawn. The aspens are bare now. The gold's all come down in the last week, blown into the ditches, and my headlights sweep over wet dead leaves at every switchback. Sergeant rides with his nose pressed to the back window, looking at the valley behind us.

He whines the whole way to the top.

At the summit I pull over. The valley spreads out below in the dark. A few porch lights. The church steeple catching the first gray. Somewhere down there she's either sleeping or she isn't.

I did the right thing. I let her go before she had to leave. That's what a decent man does.