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We stared at the view, the autumn landscape as familiar as his hand in mine.

“Why didn’t you tell me and let me be there for you?” I asked very quietly after a while.

He tensed, then sighed audibly. “Because I wanted you to be living your best life and not having to handle my mess.”

Every word was so goddamn Bodhi they made me snort softly. “When has my life ever been better without you in it, Bode?”

He didn’t have an answer to that, so we just sat there quietly, until Ransom got restless and stomped her foot a couple of times.

“Let’s go home,” Bodhi said quietly, but it took him a few more seconds to move away from me, and I soaked in every one of those seconds.

“Actually… can we take a detour?” I asked, the idea coming to me in an instant.

He frowned, then shrugged. “Sure.”

No questions asked. Bodhi did what he always would when we were kids: he agreed to my plan before knowing the details, and then assessed on the way to whatever I had cooked up. Not that I’d ever been a bad kid or anything. Building the tree house had been the wildest thing we’d done outside of building a raft the year the creek flooded in the springtime. We’d been sixteen and definitely knew better. But when had teen boys ever listened to even their own reason?

I got up and we went to the horses. Soon, we were on our way.

It took about two minutes for Bodhi to realize where we were heading.

I glanced over at him and Ez. “Is the path still there?”

“Somewhat. I did ride it a couple of months ago, but I didn’t cross the fence line.”

We rode until we got to the gate that had been there, near the path to the Paxton property, since about three weeks after we first met as little kids.

It had been replaced, of course, over the years. It was metal now, and swung open with ease that told me someone—likely Bodhi—had greased the hinges regularly.

He closed it behind us and hopped back on his gorgeous horse.

“Ez looks a lot like Nelson,” I mused.

He squinted at me, then chuckled. “You named him Nelson?”

I grinned. “Yup.”

“Ha-ha!” Bodhi deadpanned in the voice of the Simpsons character.

I laughed. Christ, this man still knew me so well. We’d spent a lot of time as teens watching The Simpsons, and I’d wondered if he’d realize the double-meaning of the name.

It was silly. My Nelson wasn’t a bully, but I wasn’t naming him for that anyway. I was giving him a name that was a secret nod to our formative years while also fitting the theme of what my life had been for the last two decades with the country music nod.

The path was overgrown, but it wasn’t too bad with the horses being so tall. The branches and brush swept our feet sometimes, but the way through the woods was still familiar.

Most of the land beyond the stretch of woods was old farmland. It was basically all the land my parents had owned back in the day, but they hadn’t been more than hobby farmers.

When they started to talk about moving away from Colorado about ten years ago, I offered to buy them out.

The whole twenty-five acre property had been left alone ever since. I’d paid for them to get their stuff moved to Kentucky where Mom was originally from. Then I’d made sure the house was good to leave rot where it was. I’d done all of it from Nashville or while I was on the road. I hadn’t been back here in thirteen years.

When we got to the little incline that we referred to as the fenceline, where once an old wooden fence had stood, I stopped Ransom and just looked at it all.

It was overgrown. There were some wildflowers trying to cling to life and it was kind of nice to see that the native species had taken over as much as they could without help. The house in the distance was a faded gray now. It’d been light blue once, with darker blue shutters and a tin roof that made my room upstairs loud as fuck when it rained.

I was surprised all the windows, at least on this side, were still intact.

“Do you want to go look closer?” Bodhi asked quietly.