“Well, all right.” The man—tall, narrow, with a receding hairline and a forehead that shone like the marble tile he’d just crossed to reach them—smiled wider, revealing a set of oversize teeth. With his gaze fixed only on Lily, he said, “I could hazard a guess, but just to be sure, I think you’d better tell me your name.”
Leo turned to take in her reaction, wondering whether she could see the answer to all of her worries unfolding right this second. With her brows cinched close in mistrustful surprise, her chin set defensively tight, Leo saw the way she strangled that hope down with a tight fist.
“Lily Wilder,” she said. “And you are?”
“Ed Tottenham.” He reached out a hand for Lily to shake. “Christ on a cracker, Lily Wilder, I was beginning to think you might never show up.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Laramie, Wyoming
Two months later
THE FOUR FLUTES pressed together in a celebratory clink, but Nicole’s glass came in hot, sloshing and spilling champagne down her hand.
“Fuck.” Unfazed, she bent, licking a long streak from her wrist and up along the back of her thumb.
Walter tracked this with his eyes before meeting Lily’s gaze, had a brief but visible internal meltdown, and then tossed back his full glass.
Lily brought her own flute to her lips, closing her eyes as the fizzy drink tickled her nose and popped tart and bright across her tongue. She’d never liked champagne—to be fair, she’d rarely had an opportunity to try it—but Leo had driven into town to shop specifically for that night’s dinner and brought home a case of what he promised to be good bubbles. She was determined to understand what everyone else tasted.
As usual, Nic voiced what Lily was already thinking: “Tastes like carbonated cough syrup.” Nic smacked her tongue to the roof of her mouth, frowning. “Blech.”
Leo grinned at them, charmed and uncomplaining. “I’ll have yours,” he said, starting to reach for it.
Nic ducked away, tilting her glass back and draining it. “I never said I had a problem with cough syrup.”
Laughing, Leo stood and moved to the kitchen to grab a fresh bottle. He had happily spent five hundred dollars on a case of champagne that his girlfriend and her best friend wouldn’t appreciate. Most nights it was just the two of them. Leo cooked while Lily wrapped up the evening chores in the stables, and they clinked the necks of their beer bottles together over the long knobby table in the expansive dining room, curling up with books or a movie after all the work was done. No matter what their bank statements now said, Leo had fully—and blissfully—embraced the simple life.
Tonight was special, though. They would transition to beer at some point—all signs pointed to debauchery ahead—but for a reunion like this, bubbles were called for. Walter had flown in from New York that morning; Nic had driven over from… well, next door. Last week she’d closed the deal on the fifty acres of sagebrush and riverbank adjoining Wilder Ranch.
“To Nicole being a landowner,” Lily said, refilling their glasses for a proper toast.
Clink.
“To Leo and Lily reopening Wilder Ranch,” Walt added.
“Next summer,” Leo quickly clarified, his voice a little tight under the awareness of everything that still had to be done. Buy horses, train them, outfit the lodge and cabins for guests, hire staff. And, of course, take a couple of trips overseas.
It was the compromise they’d made with her dead father: at least two months every year spent making her world bigger.
Clink.
Leo’s smile softened, and that thing that had been knotted inside Lily as long as her earliest memory seemed to loosen a tiny bit more. I love you, his expression said. I’m not ever going to leave you. Maybe by the time next summer rolled around, it would sink in that this was real and that anxious knot inside her would be a loose rope, or even better still, a skein of cashmere, a soft strand of silk.
“Are you going to let us see that letter?” Walt asked, and at her nod, Leo stood, disappearing into the office and returning with the folded yellowed sheet.
Walter took the paper from him. “How many times have you read it?”
“Probably a thousand.” Lily chewed her lip for a beat before adding, “It’s going to take some time for it all to feel real.”
“I bet.” She watched Walter read, feeling like she knew the contents well enough to track the words as his eyes moved across the page.
Dear Lily,
If you’re reading this, it means we’ve finished the trip and you’re about to open a box with your future inside. I hope you enjoyed this adventure. It’s taken me a few years to get this right, and now that you’re reading it, I hope we can say that we had the time of our lives.