“You want me to carry her up to bed?” Colton asked. “They said she’ll be out of it until the morning.”

“If you don’t mind.” Simone was too heavy for Emma to carry anymore. “That would help. Thank you.”

Emma and Lucy followed Colton upstairs to the room where Simone had been sleeping. She’d been told it was Colton’s sister Charley’s old room. He laid her gently on the bed, pulled the covers up and over her and kissed the girl’s forehead. “Sleep tight, sweetheart.”

Moved by Colton’s tenderness toward her daughter, Emma perched on the edge of the bed, trying not to wince from her own soreness. She wished Simone would wake up and fill the room with the usual chatter about everything that’d happened since they last saw each other.

“I’ll be right downstairs if you ladies need me,” Colton said.

“Thanks, Colton,” Emma said. To Lucy, she added, “Did you try to get me?”

“All afternoon.”

“I’m really sorry. We were… We went for a ride in the mountains.”

“Is that a metaphor?” Lucy asked, giving her sister a knowing look.

Emma should’ve known that her older sister would see right through her ruse. “I feel sick that she was hurt and you couldn’t reach me. What kind of mother—”

“You are the best mother I’ve ever known in my entire life. Taking a day off doesn’t make you a bad mother.”

“Not being reachable when my child is hurt makes me a bad mother.”

“No, it makes you someone who has now officially visited the cell phone wasteland known as Butler, Vermont. It’s not your fault, Em.” Lucy sat next to her on the bed. “So you had a nice time?”

“You could say that.”

Lucy nudged her shoulder. “Come on. This is me. You can do better than that.”

To her utter mortification, Emma began to cry.

Lucy put her arm around her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong. Other than Simone getting hurt, today was one of the best days of my entire life.”

“So then why the tears?”

“Think about it, Luce. I finally meet a really great guy, and he lives six hours from me. It just feels so…”

“Doomed from the start?”

“Something like that.”

“I know that feeling. I’ve been there, but we made it work.”

“You didn’t have a child to think about.”

“True, but please don’t think any of this is insurmountable. If it’s meant to be, it’ll be.”

“I don’t know if it’s meant to be, but it sure felt that way for a couple of hours today.”

“So you haven’t forgotten how?” Lucy asked. “That’s a relief.”

Emma elbowed her in the ribs, making her sister laugh.

“It was good, huh?”

Emma huffed out a laugh. “Spectacular.”

“Where’d you go?”