She winced, searching back and forth between his eyes.
“I still love you,” he told her. “In hindsight, if I’d never come out here, if I hadn’t seen you again, I would have just kept moving forward with a life half-lived.” Leo took a step closer, gently crowding her space. “I see you doing the same thing, Lil. You’re just trying to get through every day.”
“Leo—”
“There’s probably not a life for me in Hester, but there’s a life for us somewhere else if you want to try to find it.”
She stared at him for several silent heartbeats. “This is crazy. You’ve known me for a week.”
“Five months plus a week, with a little gap in between.”
She closed her eyes, tilting her face up. “I need you to understand that I can’t shape my life around someone else ever again. Every day has been dictated by another person’s shitty choices, or my own circumstances resulting from another person’s shitty choices. I realize I’m being rigid here, but I have to be. I can’t bend to suit what works for you.”
“Then let me bend,” he told her.
Lily stared at him. “What does that even mean?”
“It means you figure out exactly what you want your life to look like, and I find a way to fit into it.” He reached forward, drawing a strand of hair from where it was stuck to her lip. “Maybe you get a job on a bigger ranch, and I—”
“I can’t work for someone else’s operation like that.” She seemed to hear the stubborn edge to her voice and softened. “I know myself, Leo. I’d be frustrated all the time.”
“Then we set a goal and work toward getting our own ranch.”
“Leo, you’re on the verge of getting a promotion.”
“Exactly. We’ll save up faster.”
She set her jaw, shaking her head. “We have to find this money.”
“Why is that the only way?”
“Never mind the whole dead-body situation,” she said pointedly. “It’s the only way I can imagine right now. If we don’t find this money, whether you’re here or not, I’ll have to keep doing some version of this. And this isn’t the life of someone in a relationship.”
Leo nodded, thinking this through. If she was even able to keep leading her tours, she’d be gone most of the time. He’d be alone in Hester, or some nearby town, working an hourly job just to have the privilege of seeing her a couple of days a week. He wasn’t saying he wouldn’t do it, but he did see her point.
He cupped her face and rested his lips on hers. “I guess we’d better find that treasure, then.”
* * *
They set back out, talking every now and then and pointing to things occasionally, but for the most part their focus was entirely on not breaking an ankle on the increasingly treacherous landscape and looking up every so often in search of this tiny cabin in the middle of the most remote part of Utah. Leo sensed Lily’s anxiety begin to bloom the closer they got to where she expected it to be, the longer there was literally no sign of other humans ever having stepped foot this far out.
The trip to the cabin should have been the easy part, but now it was sinking in that this adventure could really be over fast. One night down and then back out of this canyon, calling the whole thing off, left with the fallout of Walter in a cast and Terry dead.
Suddenly the sky went dark and the temperature dropped perceptibly.
Lily picked up her pace when they hit a flat stretch, just before a bend in the river, and Leo heard her sharp “Oh my God!” just before the first ball of hail hammered him on the back of the neck.
The first few pieces to land were small, maybe the size of a pea, but then a hailstone the size of an ice cube landed near his foot, and Lily took a golf-ball-size one to the shoulder. But it didn’t matter, because her exclamation wasn’t about hail anyway.
It was about a cabin only a hundred feet away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
ALL THEY COULD do was cover their heads and force their way in through the rusty, crumbling door. They burst inside, laughing and breathless.
“Oh my God with this weather!” Lily wiped her face. “I give up. Clear forecast, my ass.”
Leo laughed. The tin roof of the tiny cabin was intact—mostly—the walls warped and crooked but with no major gaps. Hail flew in sideways through a blown-out window, clattering with eerie menace on the floor until they managed to pull one of the tents out and hang it around the jagged frame. It turned the light inside a strange, soft blue. Lily spun in a slow circle, taking it all in.