He checks the horse pen first. They’re in a semicircle at the round bale, though only Poco looks content; the others are eating as fast as possible while snow collects down the broad lines of their shoulders, backs, and hips. Poco jerks his head up at the sight of Robbie, looking hopeful, but when Robbie only checks the water tank and doesn’t move near the gate, he goes back to his hay without coming over.

Robbie probably does spend too much time alone. That has to be part of the reason why he’s reacting so powerfully to Lance’s pretty face. Not to mention his pretty…everything else. But it’s not that Robbie wants to be all alone out here, as he told Megan plenty of times. Who’s he going to make an effort to go and see? The few of his old friends from high school who still live around here? They never had much in common except that they were born in the same place. It was no hardship to stop spending time with them in favor of keeping the ranch going and taking care of the boys. The boys were company enough.

Then the boys left him, one by one.

As Robbie treks over to check on his neighbor’s runaway cows, he’s so lost in his thoughts that he stares at the dark spot in the snow inside their pen for a solid second before he registers what it is. When he does, he breaks into a run, leaps over the board fence, and skids to the ground on his knees next to the unmoving shape, hoping he’s not already too late.

Chapter Nine

Lance

Lance feels a familiar satisfaction at getting bundled up in the kind of clothing that can conquer the weather. His earliest memories of winter in the little house with his father are of loneliness and cold. After he and Danny became friends, though, Lance quickly learned to enjoy the snow and ice. The Chases offered him clothes year round, but it was in winter when he was hard-pressed to say yes. Robbie always claimed they had plenty of extra coats and boots and snow pants that Johnny had outgrown. Lance pretended not to notice that most of these items had a suspicious lack of wear, and once Lance even found a tag in the inseam of a pair of fleece-lined jeans.

Armored with all of the appropriate gear, he and Danny were able to spend hours out in the woods during even the coldest months, tunneling in snow drifts, building snowmen and towers and forts, and packing snowballs and throwing them at each other with remarkably terrible aim.

Maybe it’s those memories that lead Lance into the trees by the creek, instead of up the driveway toward the road and the bridge.

When he went to live with his aunt right after his sixteenth birthday, he had to get used to living in a town, on a cultivated street where there wasn’t a flower blooming that someone hadn’t planted, or a tree that wasn’t ringed in mulch. He missed the wildness of Trace County fiercely at first, though it was hard to separate that feeling from all of the other grief. Lance missed home in all the meanings of the word—the creek sound, a steady background music he could hear whenever he paused and really listened; Danny’s laugh; the smell of horses lingering on the jackets Robbie and Johnny left on pegs by the door on the porch; the rumble of tires churning gravel when a vehicle was still miles off; the way the creekbanks clotted with decaying leaves and pine needles to form a fragrant, slick hazard; Robbie’s face and the warmth in his eyes when he smiled at Lance.