Loving her could only ever be a gift.

She nodded. “Okay.”

This moment was familiar, too. Sitting in the diner. Eating hamburgers. But this moment wasn’t recognizing his feelings, giving names to them. He had avoided that for a long time. He didn’t know if it was common to have a revelation and a breakdown over a cheeseburger, but he sure as hell was. And he was too consumed by the implications of his own feelings to fully process that she was essentially saying she didn’t love him. But he couldn’t even get to that place. Not yet. Someday, maybe. But not yet.

“I’ve loved you for a long time,” he said, his voice rough. “I just want you to know that.”

Because he wanted to say it. Because he wanted to know it. Wanted to feel it. He had always felt like Sammy was his freedom. The embodiment of emotions and exuberance that he could never inhabit. But the truth of the matter was, she made him feel all those things. She was the key to it, and he had locked it away for all this time because he had been afraid to call it what it was. Because he had been afraid of what it meant. Of the fact that it would mean tying himself down like this. Of the fact that it would mean marriage and kids, or it would mean rejection and heartbreak, and he had already experienced loss that had been like a bullet to the chest and he still had the shrapnel there. He had known that he couldn’t take on any more. But it was Sammy, and he couldn’t not.

Because he had tied himself down. Lost himself to this ranch, to this life, in part so that he would always be entwined with her. He had made himself a mountain, a rock, a man who felt nothing so that he could handle all that he believed they could ever be.

This was freedom. And now that he knew what it was, it wasn’t half as terrifying as the alternative.

“Okay,” she said. He was tempted to be hurt by that, when he looked into her eyes and saw the kind of hollow fear that he had seen on her face that night he had rescued her from her father. And he ached.

“We’re in this together,” he said. “Either way. No matter what.”

She nodded. And then they went back to eating. And he couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that one of the deepest, most spiritual moments of his life had occurred at the Mustard Seed Diner, and that it had passed as quietly as it had come on ferociously.

And that it would leave him with an ache in his soul. Because his beautiful sunshine girl was somewhere lost in the dark, and he didn’t know how to reach her.

So he would just love her until he did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

EVERY MORNING SAMMY woke up with a panicked feeling rattling around in her chest. And every morning it took her a little while to identify exactly what it was that had her feeling so panicked.