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  But there had been a time when she’d been connected to her sister like no other person on earth. They’d shared a womb. They’d understood each other.

  And Vanessa had ruined that. She’d gotten angry at Olivia for being a tattletale, but she’d said so many horrible things to Olivia.

  They’d been close once. They’d changed and grown apart. But she’d changed again. And maybe...maybe they could be close again.

  The idea of feeling close to Olivia again...

  The idea of having her family again, imperfections and all, was enough to make her heart feel swollen.

  “I’ve met your sister,” Ellie said. “She’s lovely.”

  “She is. It would be hard to have a different opinion on Olivia. She’s truly one of the best people.” Of course, lovely wasn’t always the word that people used to describe Olivia. Olivia was complicated too.

  Their relationship was complicated.

  They were twins. Sharing a birthday, sharing facial features...and nothing else, really.

  But the bond was real. And, oh, when she’d come back for the wedding...

  She hadn’t seen her sister in years, and in that moment, all the anger, all the pain, it had faded away. They’d just embraced. Cried. Held each other.

  It had been the same with her parents. In those blissful moments it had been a reunion and nothing more. None of the weighted things. None of the hurt or pain.

  They’d had some lunches since then and the cracks—especially with her parents, and with Olivia’s protectiveness of them—had begun to show.

  It couldn’t be that reunion moment forever. Not for her sake or theirs.

  But it was that moment that made her crave the reconciliation.

  She wasn’t quite ready to tackle it, not just yet. She needed to get established, to get everything in order, and then she would initiate further contact with her parents. With Olivia, and her husband, Luke.

  They knew that she was here. There was no way to hide her presence in Gold Valley, nor would she have ever tried to. But they were very sensitive—perhaps too sensitive—to Vanessa’s need for space.

  Sometimes she wondered if it was sensitivity or if they just didn’t want her around.

  Either way, the ball had been left in her court, and she was actually all right with that.

  “Classes start tomorrow,” Ellie said, her fingertips brushing over the countertop. “It will be good to be back to teaching. A little bit strange. And this is so unusual. I’ve taught individual classes at the high school level, but I’ll be doing...well, everything but art, and that’s new.”

  “Is teaching your passion? Sorry. That was probably a weird-sounding question. It’s just that I think about that a lot now.”

  Vanessa was lately very interested in the subject of passions. She’d never had one. Not when she was younger. She had felt superior to the world around her, to her parents, to her sister.

  Especially when she had started using. As if she had crossed an invisible barrier that she believed other people were just too afraid to get on the other side of.

  She had been smug and entirely certain of her choices. She had been an idiot.

  Any potential she’d had to acquire a passion of her own had been poured directly into her opiate addiction. It had started with pills. Pills that could be stolen from her friends’ parents, pills she could buy. Pills she could talk a doctor into prescribing. But eventually, after she’d gone to California and exhausted clinics that would give her pills, and most of her money, she’d fallen into heroin.

  Her passion had become getting high.

  Getting clean and sober had been like being spit out right back where she had left off.

  She hadn’t built a life with anything she could keep. She had no friends that she could continue relationships with.

  She’d had no real education, no job prospects.

  She had burned every bridge anyone had ever tried to build for her.

  She had been twenty-two and starting over. Utterly and completely.

  She felt lucky, every day, that she had started over that early.

  “It was,” Ellie said. “I’m hoping that I’m going to get back there.”

  “Did you want to start work again?”

  “I needed to,” Ellie said. “I have to do something. For someone else. I mean, I have Amelia. And that’s been... It’s been good. I lost the love of my life, and I don’t have any answers about why. None of it makes sense. And when he died, it was like my passion for everything just faded away. I waited for it to come back. I had the luxury of that since Clint’s insurance money was more than enough to keep us comfortable. But I decided that I can’t wait for it to come back anymore. I need to do something to jump-start it. If I don’t, I might never feel it.”

  “Fake it till you make it?”

  “Maybe.” She laughed. “Though I can’t tell anyone here I’m faking it or they’ll worry too much. But somehow I feel like I can tell you.”

  “You definitely can,” Vanessa said. “I’m the queen of fake it till you make it. I don’t have a story of hitting rock bottom and deciding to do rehab. I got arrested for possession and I had the option of entering a treatment program before charges were brought against me. So...I took it.”

  Ellie’s expression was neutral, and Vanessa smiled. “I’m an addict. I’ve been sober for five years. I’m not sure what shows up in my background checks because...you know, rehab helped me avoid having a criminal record. Hopefully you don’t want to kick me out of your school now.”

  “No,” Ellie said. “Of course not.”

  “I’m not embarrassed,” Vanessa said. “I’ve had a long time to come to terms with myself. But I know other people haven’t.”

  “Well, I’m fine with you. Honestly, it’s been a really long time since I’ve had another woman to talk to about anything. I have Tammy, but she’s more of a mother figure. And Caleb is great. But he’s a guy. It’s nice to have you here.”

  Vanessa tried to suppress her smile. Because she didn’t want to look too thrilled by that statement. But she was.

  “Court-ordered rehab is how I found my passion, by the way. One night they made us paint. They made us paint a feeling. I thought it was so stupid. But I did it anyway. And at first, I thought I would just phone it in, but then suddenly it was like... It was like seeing myself on a canvas.”

  She remembered pouring out red, orange, yellow. Her rage, all over the canvas. She remembered feeling a sense of catharsis like she hadn’t known she could feel. She’d been in some strange space where she had been able to experience a negative feeling to its full extent, and when she was finished, it had been out in front of her, out in front of the world, and she hadn’t felt like she needed to use.

  For her it had been a revelation. To feel so much over something so simple. Something that amounted to little more than finger paint.

  After that, she’d had direction. She had pursued art school. Had pursued every opportunity she could possibly have to learn as much as she could. To get into the studio when she could. And the end result had been the opportunity to teach art. The opportunity to help others use it as therapy.

  “I stumbled upon my passion late,” Vanessa said. “At least, compared to a lot of other people. But I have it.”

  “That’s all that matters. Not having it...”

  “I’m sorry,” Vanessa said.

  “I know. Everyone is.”

  “That’s kind of nice, though. In a way.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence lingered between them, and Vanessa let it. There was a definite difference between the kind of sorry you could be for someone who had lost a spouse to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and the kind of sorry people felt for a drug addict who had made all of her own choices. She had encountered every single reaction possible over the course of the years. Some people pitied her. Some people judged her.

  Everyone had a story about drugs or alcohol, how it had affected them or those
around them.

  And oftentimes what had happened to the addict the person knew informed their own feelings about drug use. About the odds that Vanessa would stay clean. About whether or not they saw it as a disease or a moral failure, or a mix of the two.

  But one thing Vanessa knew for sure. No matter the reaction, it often robbed her of the opportunity to be seen as a person separate from her addiction.

  She wasn’t ashamed of her past. Letting go of shame had been a key part in her finding sobriety. But sometimes she wished... Sometimes she wished she could find a way back to when she was just Vanessa.

  Yeah, sometimes she wished that.

  “I’ll leave you to get set up,” Ellie said.

  “Thanks,” Vanessa responded.

  She appreciated Ellie, and the way that she looked at Vanessa without judgment. That she had hired her to work with these kids. In spite of the fact that she had a past herself. Hell, maybe she’d hired her because she had a past.

  Vanessa was fine with that.

  The one thing she couldn’t do was pretend those years spent in hell and oblivion didn’t exist. And she wouldn’t do it either. Not for someone else’s comfort.

  That was what shame boiled down to, after all. Being afraid of what someone else’s feelings were. If you, your past, your pain, were hard for them to deal with.

  Vanessa did her best not to feel it anymore. There was too much crap in life as it was.

  “I’ll see you around,” Ellie said, giving her a small wave before she headed back out the door. Vanessa took a deep breath and surveyed her surroundings.

  She almost didn’t need any of the things she had brought with her. But she was going to get them all set up anyway.

  This was her new place. This was why she was here.

  And maybe it was a little ironic to have a fresh start in a place where so much of the past existed. But she didn’t really mind that either. This was her classroom. Her studio. Her life.

  Control was hers. It was no different than it had been back in California.

  Her own life, her own terms. And now she was doing it in Gold Valley.

  She’d spent a long time avoiding the deep end. So, her new method was to fling herself right down in it. All things considered, she felt pretty optimistic about it. She’d made a decision long ago about optimism. Whether she believed something would be good or not, if she tried and failed it would hurt. So she might as well look at it positively. Optimism cost nothing. And it made the world around her much more pleasant.

  She busily worked to get her things in place. Her paintbrushes. Her favorite supplies.

  When she was done there were still hours left in the workday, and she decided that she wanted to get a look around the entire ranch.

  Maybe she should send Ellie a text to see if she was up to giving a tour. But Vanessa had enjoyed the quiet, had enjoyed the hours spent alone, and she wanted to wander around in her own head for a while.

  She walked out of the studio and into the pale early-autumn sunlight. It was still fairly warm out, the summer season seeming to grow longer and later every year.

  But there were differences. The light that filtered through the trees had a more orange glow than the heat of summer typically did, and there was an underlying crispness in the air, different from the typical early-morning summer chill that arrived for a few hours at night and began to burn off starting at around 9 a.m.

  Subtle changes and hints that the season was shifting.

  The kind of thing she never would have noticed when she was younger. When each and every day spent in Gold Valley was just a long bore running into the next.

  The difference in her own feelings was perhaps the strangest experience about homecoming. She craved everything she had hated back then. A sense of simplicity. Of sameness. A pace that was slow enough that she could ponder the way the air felt, and how that signaled a change in season.

  She wanted to buy a wreath for the front door. Something that existed to simply be pretty and allow her to enjoy a moment.

  She had been running from quiet moments for a lot of her life.

  Because it was in those quiet moments that bad feelings often took hold.

  The ability to be quiet, to be alone, was something that she had only cultivated in sobriety. She had avoided it at first. Staying busy, learning new things and engaging in group sessions had been the best thing for her for a good while.

  But the pace of LA had gotten to be too much, not to mention the cost was prohibitive. And if she wanted to be able to slow down, she was going to have to get the kind of life that didn’t demand such an intense working schedule.

  Plus, she hadn’t wanted an apartment anymore. She wanted a house. Something else she hadn’t cared about for all that long.

  But in many ways it was like waking up. Like a cautious, tender plant just breaking through the soil and reaching for the sun.

  She’d heard before that five years was a magic number in sobriety. That it was when your brain became yours again.

  In her experience, it was true. She felt so different now. Like a new person entirely.

  But that had come from hours of therapy. Of groups. Of finding ways to fill the black hole she’d imagined Vanessa Logan was with feelings, thoughts and aspirations instead of pills. Until—bit by bit—she’d become a person and not a void.

  It had started with hating herself. Blaming herself.

  For taking the pills. For drinking too much. For blacking out.

  For everything that had happened after.

  And oblivion, more often than not, had seemed like salvation.

  But it was just drinking poison, thinking it was water.

  She pushed those thoughts to the side and decided to focus on the warmth of the day. She hadn’t spent as much time marinating on befores and afters in her other life.

  But it was this place.

  This place that made her get just a little bit more ponderous. And while, to an extent, she was happy to embrace that because it was a part of her healing process, she would also just like to have a day.

  A normal day on a beautiful ranch where she was starting an amazing job she was more excited about than she had been anything for quite some time. She smiled. It felt good to be here. Felt good to have hope. Life just felt good. And she was enjoying the hell out of herself.

  The entire spread of the ranch was beautiful, with large barns built in a modern style, with clean lines and windows and neatly manicured arenas all over the property.

  There were wide swaths of manicured lawn in deep rich green with white fences bracketing the borders.

  It was perfection, though Vanessa knew just how much this kind of perfection could hide pain.

  But she wasn’t going to think about that. It wasn’t her pain either way.

  Whatever politics the Dalton family had to navigate weren’t her problem. She was just here to work. To teach art.

  She felt almost giddy with the freedom of it. All of it.

  She paused at one of the barns and saw that it was open. Curiosity got the better of her. She wandered through the door, her eyes taking a moment to adjust to the dim light inside. It was cool, even with the front door and back door open, it seemed to make a good job of letting breeze filter on through.

  She heard movement in a stall and assumed it was a horse. So when a man appeared, she startled and leaped backward.

  “Oh!” She put her hands up in a defensive position, like it would do anything to stop...well, anything.

  The man whirled around, his cowboy hat pushed low over his face, his height and breadth almost overwhelming her.

  But even so, she knew exactly who it was.

  Of course, yet again the person she encountered was Jacob Dalton.

  Because he was the guardian angel she’d never asked for, or something. Except, he felt a lot more inconvenient than she had imagined a guardian angel should.

  “Vanessa,” he said. “Is something else on fire?”

 
“Not that I’m aware of. I would have thought you have a radio for that kind of thing.”

  “I was just trying to figure out exactly why you were here.”

  “Well,” she responded, “I’m the new art teacher.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JACOB COULD ONLY stare at Vanessa Logan, the second time in the space of twenty-four hours. Which seemed strange considering that, until yesterday he hadn’t seen her in about ten years.

  “Of course you are,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Though I’m not sure why you say it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  She sighed heavily. “I’m not going to play games with you. You didn’t really act one way or the other yesterday. But you remember me?”

  It occurred to him then that of course she might doubt that he did. Or at least, that he might not have ever connected her with the sad, pathetic girl who he’d handled while in distress all that time ago. And he could say no. Could keep them both from having the conversation.

  But then, there was no real point to that. She didn’t seem embarrassed. In fact, she was staring at him with her brown eyes glittering.

  She was a strong woman, was Vanessa Logan. He didn’t have to know anything about what had happened to her in the ensuing years to know that.

  All he had to do was remember that night, when she’d been scared and in pain, but not broken. Alone and holding herself together.

  “I remember you,” he said. “I remember the emergency call.”

  “I thought you might.” She swallowed hard. “You didn’t say anything yesterday.”

  “Well, I didn’t really want to bring it up, in case you didn’t want me to.”

  Which was crediting a hell of a lot more decency to him than he deserved. The fact of the matter was, he just hadn’t wanted to bring it up because he didn’t do heavy subject matter. Not if he could help it.

  “That’s nice of you. But ten years and a whole lot of therapy later, I can talk about it.”