The Hero of Hope Springs - Maisey Yates Page 0,114

though she had been found, she could not escape the feeling that she was still in hiding.

That she was still bound up in all she had been.

She’d started this journey to prove she wasn’t stuck.

She’d only ended up proving that she was.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

IT HAD BEEN a week since Sammy had left, and he was still coping with intense bouts of feeling like he’d lost his best friend in the world. Because he had. That just happened to be layered on top of the heartache that he felt every time he took a breath. Every time he didn’t take a breath. Every time he moved.

He knew that he could survive it. He knew that he could survive anything.

That was the problem, though. Just because you could survive something didn’t mean you’d won.

It just meant you were still here.

He knew from the experience of loving lives lost that being here was a victory.

But it wasn’t a very happy one, and in fact, it rang hollow, like the whole rest of him.

Still, he had gone down to town today and bought fencing supplies, and he had run into his former coach at Big R.

Normally, he would have kept his head down and kept on walking. Assume that the man wouldn’t remember him. And anyway, sometimes Ryder didn’t much have the desire to get into nostalgic conversation with people. Because nothing about that time was nostalgic for him.

Dreams he had to leave behind, and fresh grief and loss.

But he remembered what Logan had said, so he had started talking to him. And he had found out the old man was retiring. He hadn’t been head coach for some time, but he’d been assistant, and the school was looking to hire someone else. And of course he remembered Ryder, and still thought he was the best player to have ever come through Gold Valley High School.

Assistant coaching football wasn’t something Ryder had ever given much thought to. And he supposed it wasn’t necessarily a vocation in a town this size, but he didn’t really need it to be, considering that he had a ranch to work.

But now he was thinking about that. Getting back into football. Doing more than just watching it on TV on a Sunday.

He had taken his number, and had put in a phone call. Just his name, and the word the coach had already put in had netted him an interview.

And when he sat down to dinner that night, he knew the whole family was thinking they were going to have to avoid his foul mood, but he decided to surprise them instead.

“I’m applying for a job.”

Iris and Rose looked up. Logan, to his credit, didn’t really react.

“What kind of job?” Rose asked.

“Assistant football coach at Gold Valley High School. Junior varsity.”

“Wow,” Rose said. “I didn’t know you could still... Well, I didn’t know you still remembered the rules to football.”

“Of course I do, squirt,” he said. “I’m not likely to forget something that I used to live and breathe. But yeah, I figured it was high time I did something with those skills. There has to be some good to come out of it. Otherwise, it’s just sitting there and I’m not using it.”

He would have said that it was impossible for him to feel excited about anything at this point in time, but he felt mildly excited about this.

No, it wasn’t his life being put back together in the way that he wanted it. But it was taking some of the pieces that he was left with and shaping them into something different.

Finding something new.

He supposed there was something to be said for that.

“I’m happy for you,” Logan said. “It’s a good thing.”

“Well, I don’t have the job yet. My old coach is the one leaving the position, and he’s recommending me for it. So I mean, I’m going to have a bit of a personalized recommendation, which never hurts. But you never know. There might be somebody all lined up ready to take the slot.”

“Nobody who would be as good as you,” Rose said, and her blind loyalty to him made up for her brattiness of a few moments earlier.

“Would you have been a football player, do you think?” Iris asked. “If it hadn’t been for us?”

“I would have been the wrong kind of man if I had turned away from my responsibilities. Not a man that I could’ve been proud of. It doesn’t really have anything to do with you so much as the shape of the