had gotten it, it took her thirty whole seconds to actually process the words.
“What?”
“The job is yours, Pansy.”
“How?” she asked.
“Oh there was vigorous debate,” he said. “Especially after you showed up late to the last interview. But believe me when I tell you that Johnson put in a pretty piss-poor performance over his interviews, and the prospect of hiring an outsider didn’t thrill anyone. Not even Barbara. Combined with your track record, and the results of your evaluations...it was a unanimous decision in the end.”
“I have the job,” she echoed flatly.
“Yes, you do,” he said.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” he said.
“I...”
He stood up from behind his desk and walked around it, pulling her in for a brusque hug. “I had to give your brother the worst news anyone could have given. It means a lot to me to give you some good news, Pansy. Your dad would do that if he were here. And he would be damned proud of you. The youngest police chief in the history of the town. The first woman with the job. You’ve done him proud, Pansy. You’ve done us all proud.”
She had done it. She had done exactly what she wanted to do. Exactly what she had felt like she needed to do all her life.
Her photo would go on that wall, the same as her father’s. The Police Chief of Gold Valley, Oregon. She was finally good enough.
She had finally done it.
Those words kept playing in her head over and over again as she went about her day, went about her job.
And she waited to feel done. Waited to feel changed. Waited to feel as if she had walked through some magical, mystical veil and crossed over to the other side.
But she hadn’t.
She hadn’t even come close.
She didn’t feel changed at all. She felt hollow. And worst of all, the person that she wanted to tell most in the whole world was West.
And she... She didn’t have West.
And it all felt pointless.
Because her dad—as much as she loved him—wasn’t here to celebrate this. And West would have been. But she’d rejected him.
She had been so sure that this moment would change her. That it would make her feel like she could sit down and rest after running a long race. But she just felt numb.
And her dad was still gone.
Nothing had changed. Nothing at all.
She thought back to what Iris had said about their parents. About the way they had loved them. Hugged them.
And it all blurred together like a montage in her mind. These beautiful moments with her parents that didn’t come with a directive, or a sense of shame. These memories that she could do nothing with except feel.
She had wanted so much to avoid feeling.
Because action was so much easier than pain.
Like West said, it was so much easier to build a monument to the dead than it was to try and live. Really live. With her whole heart. With everything.
West.
He loved her.
He loved her just like she was. He loved her when she was cranky and mean and handing out tickets, and pushing him away.
He loved her in spite of everything he’d been through. And he called her brave.
But she wasn’t the one who was brave. It was him.
He was all the things that she’d been afraid to touch. Beautiful and wild, and he made her feel like she could be too. And suddenly she knew what she had to do. She knew where she needed to be.
She went into Chief Doering’s office. “Can I just take a couple of hours?” she asked.
“Why don’t you take the day off?” he asked. “We’ll start going over everything you need to know tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She changed quickly out of her uniform, got in her car and drove back toward home.
Toward Redemption Ranch.
Not her little house, but the place where West was.
When she got there, she tumbled out of her car, and ran up to the front door of his house. She knocked, but he didn’t answer.
So she started walking out toward the barn, and there she saw him, off in a distant field. She stood there and looked at him, at his broad back as he stood facing away from her, looking at the scenery. At this place where he had grown roots.
This place of redemption.
And her heart filled to overflowing. With love and pain and all the things that she had been afraid of for so long. But most of all, that sense of bursting, boundless excitement that