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I make my way toward him, choosing to deal with him rather than the woman.

When I get in front of him, he asks, "You alright?"

"Fine."

"You don't look fine. You look like you saw a ghost." He glances back at the woman I just accosted, who's already turned back to her friends. Then he adds, "That's twice this month."

I don't answer right away, because I didn't realize he'd noticed the other time, back at the feed store. I could've sworn a flash of red hair in the next aisle over belonged to Lainey, too.

I gruff, "Didn't know you were keeping count."

"Somebody's got to. You sure as hell aren't keeping track of yourself these days." He steers me toward a booth in the back corner, away from the dance floor, the band, and the crowd of people who probably watched me make a fool of myself two minutes ago. He slides in across from me like he's got all night to sit here and pick this apart. "You gonna tell me what's actually going on, or am I gonna have to guess?"

"Nothing's going on."

"Right. Nothing. That's why you just chased a stranger halfway across a bar hollering a dead woman's name."

"She's not dead."

"Might as well be, for all the good carrying a torch for a piece of ass is doing."

"She's not a piece of ass," I bark.

He leans closer, jabbing his finger on the table. "You never got her number. You don't know her last name. Carla's gone, phone's disconnected, house sold to some family from Lubbock. You've spent three months chasing a ghost around this town from a one-nighter."

"It wasn't just one night." The words come out before I can stop them, low and rough, and once they're out, there's no putting them back. "It felt like—" I stop, because I don't have a good way to finish that sentence that doesn't sound like something off a greeting card. Plus, Mason will never let me hear the end of a thing like that.

He arches his eyebrows. "Felt like what?"

I babble, "I don't know what it felt like. I just know I haven't stopped thinking about her since."

Mason's quiet a second, turning his beer bottle in a slow circle on the table, and when he finally answers, there's none of his usual teasing in it. "You know half this county thinks you're the one marrying Phoebe."

"I know."

"How the hell did that even happen?"

I grunt. "God knows. But if they have something to gossip about in this town, they will."

Mason finishes his beer, signals Casey for another round, and keeps the conversation on safer ground. We talk about engines and cattle prices and whether Troy's actually going to work up the nerve to ask the new waitress out or just talk about it until spring.

I let him carry the conversation while I go through the motions, because I don't have the energy tonight to do much more.

Somewhere out past the county line, in a town I've never been to, Lainey's living whatever life she built after she walked out of my apartment. I need to face the truth and get past it. I've got no way of finding her, no last name to search, no number, no address. The only thing I got are memories of vanilla and freckles and a laugh I'd give my whole share of the ranch to hear again.

I finish my beer slower than I mean to, watching the dance floor fill and empty out in waves. Somewhere around midnight, when Mason finally gives up trying to talk me into staying past last call, I head home to an apartment that's felt too quiet for three months straight, thinking the same thing I've thought every night since New Year's.

I'm not done looking. I just haven't figured out where else there is to look.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lainey

April

"You're doing the thing again," Marlene Whitfield, my six a.m. client, informs me. She watches me from over her horse's withers with a familiar intrigued expression.

I glance at her. "What thing?"