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.