Sara raised her shoulders in a shrug-like motion, lowered them again. “I don’t know, really—except that all this open space offers a special kind of freedom—no sidewalks, no paved parking lots, no traffic lights or crosswalks or supermarkets—”

“I guess it’s coming back to you,” J.P. observed.

She looked at him. “Growing up in the country?”

“That and what it feels like to ride a horse,” he said with a smile.

Sara and Eli’s folks hadn’t owned a big spread, like the Hollisters and the McCalls and a number of other families around Painted Pony Creek, but they’d raised their family outside of town just the same. Before and after the loss of their parents, Sara and her brother had lived much as J.P. and Cord had, as kids, doing chores, swimming in the creek, riding and camping out, running barefoot through long hot summers.

She stared pensively at the creek then, watching it tumble and swirl past, on its way to join half a dozen larger streams, then rivers.

“There are a lot of things I wish I’d done differently,” she said. “With the kids, I mean.”

“Like what?”

Sara shook her head, and it seemed she was looking inward now. “Hayley will be fine—she’s so even-tempered and practical—but I worry about Eric.”

J.P. recalled the trouble Eric had gotten into a couple of years before, when he’d hooked up with a bunch of budding criminals, released some livestock, among other offenses, and wound up in trouble with the law. The kid had done some community service after he was caught and, as far as J.P. knew, straightened out. The boy looked up to his uncle, Eli, and that, along with Sara’s tough love, had probably been his saving grace.

He might have ended up like his pal, Freddie Lansing, though.

J.P. shuddered slightly, remembering the day he and Eli and Melba Summers, a deputy at the time, had found the Lansing kid dead, hanging from a rafter in an old barn right there on the McCall ranch.

Since then, J.P. had had the place bulldozed, the weathered boards and beams and shingles hauled away to be burned.

“Is there any particular reason to worry about Eric?” he asked carefully. It was none of his business, and he didn’t want to cross any personal boundaries, but if Sara wanted someone to confide in, he was willing to listen.

Sara smiled, looking slightly wistful. “No, he’s behaving well enough,” she said. Then, with a rueful chuckle, she added, “For a teenager.”

The horses had drunk their fill by then, and they were tossing their heads, ready to be on the move again. The land was their natural habitat, after all; maybe they had some kind of genetic memory, some recollection of ancient days before the West was settled, when they’d run free and wild.