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Kelly-Anne Royston.

Beloved wife and mother.

Below it, in smaller lettering:

She chose this place.

Lara stood there with her hands in her pockets and looked out across the country stretching gold and endless below the hill.

She hadn't known the woman buried here. Never would.

But she knew the shape she'd left behind. A city woman who'd come out to hard country a long way from anything easy and decided to stay. Who'd raised a family here. Built something here. Chosen this land over and over until it became hers.

Lara looked out at the same view Kelly-Anne must have stood and looked at a hundred times, and thought, we'd have liked each other.

Or maybe they'd have driven each other insane.

Probably both.

The wind moved softly through the oak branches overhead.

The thing that settled deepest in her chest, standing there, wasn't the staying.

It was the leaving.

She'd gone. Packed a truck, left the ranch, left Dean, flown two thousand miles away.

And then she'd come back.

Not cornered into it. Not trapped.

Chosen.

That was the difference. She could have built a life somewhere else. She knew that now, for certain, in a way she hadn't before she left.

Which was the only thing that made this one mean a damn.

"I'll look after them," she said quietly. "All of them."

The oak creaked softly in the wind.

Nothing else moved.

Then she headed back down the rise toward the smoke curling from the kitchen chimney and the sound of the dogs starting up in the yard below, and she didn't look back.

There were two trucks in the yard she didn't expect.

One belonged to Mason.

He stood near the gravel with Dean, both of them turned partly away from the house, voices low. Lara only caught the tail end of it as she crossed behind them toward the porch.

"— hasn't said anything to me directly, but I thought you should know."

Then she was past them.

Dean looked over a second later. Something had shifted in his face. Not panic. Not anger. Just the look of a man carrying something heavier than he had been five minutes before.

He didn't mention it when he crossed the yard toward her. She didn't ask. Whatever Mason had driven all the way over from the Wainwright side to say could wait until Dean was ready to say it out loud.