getting to a place where they worked to spend time together was something else entirely. Something she wasn’t sure she was ready for.
But then she forgot to be concerned, as they rode up a steep trail that eventually let out at a clearing. It was beautiful. All yellow and lavender flowers and sunshine.
In late May the evening air was warm and wonderful, and the sun was beginning to cast a rose gold glow all around.
“This is beautiful,” she said.
“It is.” He helped her dismount, and then tether the horse to a tree nearby. Then he took her hand, and the picnic basket, and they picked through the tall grass, just up and over a rise that offered them a stunning view of the valley below.
“That’s why they call it Gold Valley,” he whispered.
The sun was spilling over the town below, like liquid gold illuminating the vineyards, the barns, the houses. She could just make out Main Street, the red brick set ablaze in the light.
The whole thing had been turned to miniature up here. This place that held her heart so deeply. That mattered so much. She could see it all at once.
It was incredible.
“I don’t think that’s really why they call it Gold Valley,” she said softly. “I think that has to do with the gold rush.”
“Well, now there’s no gold in the hills. But there’s definitely gold on them.”
“I guess so.”
He reached into the picnic basket and took out a blanket, spread it out on the grass, and then settled onto it.
“You know,” he said as he got food out of the basket—sandwiches, potato salad and some kind of pasta salad, “when I moved here I had the thought that I didn’t know the place yet. I found something in Texas. Something that made me a better man. I found out that I could work and I could make change in my life. And that was an important lesson. Trust me. It was when I needed to learn. More than that, because I figured out what kind of man I was going to be there, I felt like the land was in me in some way. In a way that I didn’t feel here. Texas felt like home. Until I got out of prison, and I realized I didn’t know it anymore.
“Then I came here, and I didn’t feel any more connected. But I’ve been coming up here a lot. I feel like I found my roots. This land, this dirt... It gets in your blood. I’m happy that I’m staying here. I’m happy that I’m going to ranch here. That this is the ground I’m going to work. I had to go somewhere else to find it, I think. Redemption. It’s what I’ve been searching for all this time. I found it here. I found home.”
“For me too,” she said softly.
“I love the big skies in Texas. But here they’re tall. Taller than the trees. And the mountains stretch on forever. Makes you feel small. Like you could walk into one of those thickets and never come back out. You feel your insignificance here. I needed to find my insignificance. Because I spent a whole lot of time being concerned with what I looked like to other people. Inflating their thoughts about me into something that mattered the most. And I built a scaffolding of a person around what I was.” He cleared his throat. “I went and saw my mother today.”
“Oh,” she said, her heart twisting.
“I’ve been angry at her for a long time. But I realized something today. She just hates herself, Pansy. She doesn’t think she deserves for things to work out. She doesn’t really think she deserves anything nice or good or lovely. And that’s why she couldn’t give anything to us. I can’t hate her. But I can damn well make sure that I take that lesson and learn it. For myself. Because I don’t want to be sitting by myself in the same old house in twenty years bent by bitterness and the weight of the world. And I could be. I could let my time in prison define me. I could let what happened with my ex-wife define me. But I have to be willing to let it go. I have to be willing to care about the future more than I care about the past. To want something good in the present more than I want to hang on to my anger.”
He stared out at the scene below, the