“Hey . . . are you sure you’re okay?” he’d asked, peering closely at her.
Libby could remember the swell of gratitude that he cared enough to ask, to even notice. In those weeks after Ryan told her he didn’t love her anymore, she had needed that reassurance. “I’m sure,” she’d said. She wasn’t too convincing, because he’d arched a dubious brow. Libby had sighed. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind. My dad is really ill, and . . . and . . . you know, that puts a strain on things at home.” It wasn’t a lie. She’d even asked Ryan if her preoccupation with her father’s slow death had caused him to change his mind about her. Ryan had said no, but as nothing else made sense, Libby wasn’t sure she believed him. But to Sam, she’d shrugged helplessly and said, “It’s no big deal. Just life beating down the door, as my grandmother used to say.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sam said, and he had looked sincere. “I hope everything works out.”
“Oh, it will,” Libby had said, because that’s what she did best, she assured everyone that everything was okay. “It’s just a bump in the road.” That bump had suddenly felt insurmountable. Libby had pulled her hand free of Sam’s and had started to walk, but had paused and looked over her shoulder.
He’d been watching her, and Libby had felt a rivulet of something sweet run through her. “Sure you don’t want to come and do some down dogs with me?”
“I’m sure,” he’d said with a wink.
“Suit yourself, Stiffneck.” She’d moved on, falling back into melancholy.
Turns out, she didn’t go to yoga that day, either. She just kept walking, past the studio, down to the park, where she had sat on a bench and cried some more.
No more of that. She hadn’t cried over Ryan Spangler for a very long time now.
EIGHT
Sam was up before dawn and stumbled into his kitchen, grimaced at the dishes still in the sink from last night’s attempt at chili, and dragged his fingers through his hair. He grabbed a cup from the shelf and stuck it under his new single-cup coffeemaker. Coffee was the one vice Sam allowed himself, and he had fallen in love with this machine. It was probably the most expensive thing he’d bought for himself in a year.
Hell, it was probably the only thing he’d bought for himself in a year.
He turned it on, scratched his chin, felt the stubble of a beard there. He’d been off-duty yesterday, and when one lived alone, one tended not to groom one’s face quite as often as one ought. He picked out a coffee—wild mountain blueberry—and jammed it into the cup holder. As the coffee brewed, he padded back across his little house, into his bedroom.
Admittedly, he wasn’t the neatest guy in the world. He had clothes strewn around, draped over the back of a worn-out armchair he’d rescued from an eviction a few years ago. He sorted through that stack of clothing, found some jeans, and pulled them on. He stuffed his feet into his house shoes, pulled on a jacket with sheepskin lining, and retraced his steps. With his morning cup of joe liberally doctored with cream and sugar, Sam stepped outside onto the deck in the back of his house. He paused like he did most mornings, standing as still as he could to breathe in the quiet, crisp, cold mountain air.
His place was set back in the woods, a little two-bedroom log house with a big open kitchen and living space, a huge expanse of deck under the firs out back, a garden, and the work shed he’d built from logs and stones at one end of the deck.
A mountain stream cut across the back of his property, home to a family of river trout that had been there about as long as he had. He had a fenced meadow beside the house that was full of late summer wildflowers, and a small barn for the horses he kept for those rare occasions he had to go deep into the mountains to rescue a stranded hiker.
As a rural area deputy, Sam was assigned to the backwater, remote parts of Pinero County that could not be easily reached by main street emergency responders. When Mr. Gomez had had a heart attack two years ago, it had taken an ambulance forty-five minutes to reach him. Mr. Gomez didn’t make it. Now, Sam had a defibrillator in his truck. He was a one-man show, the first line of defense. The man with the star who showed up to keep a lid on things until the cavalry could arrive.