She’d only done that once. She’d been seventeen. And she wasn’t sure what had possessed her to do it. A need for attention, most likely. She had narrowed down quite a lot of her behavior to that one root cause. When she had been young, she had been almost entirely driven by that need. She had settled into something a lot more comfortable over the past years. More comfortable with herself, which had translated into her being more comfortable with everyone around her, and a whole lot less...random and volatile.

“I’ve been thinking about something for a while,” she said as they walked out the front door of the saloon and onto the main street.

The streets were crowded, and it was dark. The air was warm, the sky clear, the golden glow from the streetlamps doing nothing to dim the light from the stars, which were like crushed silver against black velvet.

She loved a country sky.

As long as she could see those stars wherever she was, it could feel like home. And she had done a bit of roaming over the past few years in her camper van, selling her jewelry. But she always came back here.

Always came back to her touchstone.

And she was starting to wonder if that was keeping her stagnant, rather than simply holding her steady.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I’m so proud of Pansy. Of how she’s grown up. And that makes me sound about a thousand years old but...”

“Hell, you practically raised them,” he said.

“No, you raised them. Iris did. But I was there. And watching her and Rose particularly become the women that they are is really inspiring. But Pansy... She’s in love. She’s making her own family. An offshoot of what you have. And that’s an amazing thing. It’s so brave.”

“Sounds exhausting to me,” Ryder said.

“Yes, I know your opinions on marriage and the institution thereof. Also your stance on children. And I don’t blame you. I really don’t. You know why I first started giving you sugar cubes?”

“Yes. And I told you a thousand times. The sugar was not required.”

She smiled. It had started with sugar cubes. There had been a spot where she’d gone, in the mountains, and she’d looked down on the ranch imagining she was part of them. Until she had ached with it. Been full with her longing for it. She had begun sneaking into the barn, and she had given the horses at the ranch sugar cubes. And then she had started leaving them behind. Leaving them for Ryder. It was how he had first known someone was sneaking into the barn at all. She had begun doing it to get away from her father’s rages. Had gone hiding out at Hope Springs, because the name had appealed.

She’d needed some hope.

Ryder had suspected someone was in the barn, but he never found her. Until one day she left an intentional trail of sugar cubes that led right to her.