Page 41 of The Mountain Echoes

I want to be alert during the will reading, which is scheduled for later this afternoon.

Jack McCready, who goes by Mac, is one of Papa’s oldest friends. He’s part cowboy, part lawyer, the only man Papa trusted to handle his legal affairs. I know Mac fairly well. He called me right after Nadine did to ask if I’d be coming over for the funeral.

“Of course,” I say.

“Good,” he replies.

I can hear the commotion of a ranch on the line, and it makes me smile.

Someone is yelling at a dog, there’s the sharp clank of a gate swinging shut, and the low, restless bellow of cattle in the distance.

Those sounds—so distinctly ranch life—instigate memories pulled straight from my bones.

Dust, sweat, animals, and men cursing under their breath.

You could drop me anywhere in the world, but one stray moo and the metallic squeal of a worn-out hinge, and I’d know I was home.

“Look, I need you to be there for the will reading in person, so don’t run off right after the funeral, yeah?”

“I have no such plans. I intend to stay for a little while.”

“That’s excellent.” He pauses and then adds, “Rami missed you a lot.”

I don’t say anything. What can I? If he missed me, all he had to do was ask me to come home. But he didn’t.

“He made a promise to Frances that he’d keep Celine happy, and he kept it,” he continues.

Frances Ackerman Delgado, my mother, was cold, elegant, and emotionally distant, at least with me. She saw me as the reason her life was ruined—and she saw in me, Papa, so different from her in looks and personality.

When Celine was born, she looked like a doll. I fell in love with my baby sister, until I was kept away from her. Mama said she was afraid I’d hurt Celine and so began my second-class citizenship life at Longhorn.

“And is Celine happy?” I ask. It’s churlish because it isn’t Mac’s fault that Papa decided to honor his dead wife rather than his very much alive daughter.

Mac chuckles. “You’ll have to ask her.”

He’s not offended in the least. I didn’t think he’d be. It’s been many years, but I can still see him in my mind’s eye. A weathered, lean man who’s never dressed like you think a lawyer would. Jack ‘Mac’ McCready is a cowboy through and through.

He is no-nonsense and principled with a bawdy, dark, and dry humor that not many people find amusing.

He’s a mix of a judge with a gavel and a trail boss with a rifle. Mac also knows where all the bodies are buried in Wildflower Canyon as he handles the legal affairs for most of the ranches—which allows him the privilege of calling out everyone’s bullshit.

I hear the sound of heels on hardwood and brace instinctively.

I haven’t talked to my sister in a decade. And the onlyreason I spoke to Hudson on the day of the funeral was because he didn’t give me a choice.

This had been the tipping point for Papa. He didn’t care that my heart was broken—for him, it was about family, and Celine was going to have a baby, and that was that.

Celine walks into the dining room and takes a seat at the head of the table. “Good morning, Aria.”

I think about not responding and then decide that I don’t care enough about what she and Hudson did any longer.

“Morning,” I say casually, and pick up a biscuit, put it on my plate.

I don’t want to eat, but I also don’t want to run. I’ve been running long enough, ever since the day everything changed.

The sun’s been burning up everything to dust and bone. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and the land shows it—cracks sliver across the earth, the grass brittle.

Hudson and I have been at Longhorn for two months during our summer vacation.