If she couldn’t even see a way for the two of them to have something, then the possibility didn’t exist.
It wasn’t just a road to nowhere. It wasn’t a road at all.
And hell, he busted on through some brush tonight. Forged a path where there shouldn’t have been one, forced to recognize something that he shouldn’t have. But it didn’t matter.
He would get it together. And he would deal with himself.
It was going to have to start with not caring quite so damn much about the whole situation with Elliott and Iris and Rose.
It was a mistake she was going to have to make.
And he didn’t need to be there when she fell. Didn’t need to be the one to pick her up.
In fact, he desperately needed to not be that man. She didn’t want him to be. That should be enough. It had to be.
ROSE WAS STILL feeling peevish the next day. She was up early the next morning, as was her routine, but Iris was up much earlier than usual, and that irritated Rose, who wanted to sit in silence and marinate in her feelings.
“Elliott heard about your performance at the town meeting,” Iris said prosaically.
“And how do you know that?” Rose asked, suddenly much more interested in the interaction.
“He texted me,” Iris said.
Iris looked a little bit pleased and that made Rose feel good. Though that it was about her and her moral failings, as they all seemed to see it, didn’t make her feel good.
“Well, I’m a little bit sorry that it’s town gossip. But that’s it.”
“Rose, I thought you’d at least feel a little bad about it.”
“No,” Rose said, stubborn. “I am not the one who should feel bad.”
“She’s sad, Rose. You can’t find any pity for her?”
Badly done, Rose.
And that was when inconvenient memories of the night before crashed into her brain, along with the vision of very angry blue eyes.
What would Iris think if she knew about that?
That he had backed her up against the wall. That he had...touched her.
He touched your face. With his thumb. You’re the one that has turned his thumb into some kind of symbolic object.
She cleared her throat. “Anyway. I just want coffee. Not a lecture.”
“You’re unrepentant,” Iris said.
“Well, so is she. About everything.” She thought back to Logan’s words. To what he had said about her being less fortunate in some ways than Rose was. Was that true?
With some of her anger mown down, it was easier to see his words more clearly. That annoyed her. Because she was...well, she was annoyed at him and she didn’t want to see his point.
She’d been able to admit that he was...well, that he was right about some things last night. But that feeling hadn’t come with any real clarity or introspection. But here it was.
She tended to think that no one was a whole lot less fortunate than the group of them. They had lost their parents, after all.
But she was loved. For the first time she wondered if anybody actually loved Barbara.
“What?” Iris asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that... Now I’m thinking that Logan might be right.” His name tasted funny on her tongue. What had been familiar only yesterday now seemed foreign.
“Well,” Iris said, “that’s something.”
“Why are you so worried about it?”
She huffed. “Well, as a singular object of pity in a small town, maybe I feel badly for her.”
“You are not Barbara.”
“Sure.”
“And anyway, Elliott is crazy about you.”
Iris’s lips twitched slightly. “I’m not sure that I would go so far as to interpret a few texts as crazy about me.”
“You need to have more confidence in yourself,” Rose said.
But her mind was halfway occupied on all the things Logan had said to her last night. It made her wonder if she had slightly too much confidence in herself.
“I don’t know what I should have,” Iris said. “I’ve never... This is the closest I’ve ever come to dating someone, okay?” Her sister’s cheeks were pink. “And it doesn’t feel how I thought it would and I’m trying to process it all so...so. Anyway, eat your breakfast.”
Rose obliged, because she was starving. She would have normally felt a little bit more satisfied over Iris’s admission that she felt something for Elliott, but she was consumed by unease over her present situation.
That made her feel guilty.
This was all supposed to be about Iris and somehow things were spinning and twisting inside of her and making her...
She pushed her thoughts away and she collected a couple of old mugs and took the old blue-and-white metal kettle out of the pantry, pouring coffee from the carafe into it. Then she went to the living room, took her coat and hat off the peg by the door, stepped into her boots and slipped outside. It was freezing.
Early in the morning, the sun had yet to rise, and the chill in the air spoke of frost and impending snow. She supposed given that they were into December now that was normal, but the first bite of freeze in winter always took her a little bit off guard.
Changing seasons brought with them a wave of nostalgia, and she fought to keep her mind in the present as she raised her shoulders up to her ears and trudged toward the barn.
But mornings like this lived strong in memory. Weather did, for Rose. That experience of her boot hitting the porch, and the first taste of a new season’s air on her tongue could peel back the years, one by one. And this morning was no different.
She could remember a few years ago when she had come out on a morning like this and had gone to the barn, helping Logan with a cow in distress.
A few years before that, when she had just decided that working on the ranch was going to be her vocation, and she had struck out, bright-eyed and eager, completely inured to the cold, her excitement providing a layer of warmth.
The time she’d been fifteen, and she’d come out early
