Page 60 of A Fighting Chance

That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?

I have so many questions and no one to give me any answers.

I’m sitting on the porch swing sorting through all these questions when Harper walks out, wiping her hands with a towel and looking around. When she sees me, she puts her hands on her hips.

“What are you doing?” she asks, her eyes searching me for the reason why I look so disheveled.

I look down at myself. My clothes are more rumpled than usual and I’m pretty sure I have two different socks on. I’ve pushed my hands through my hair so many times, I can feel it pointing in all different directions. I haven’t trimmed my beard or even taken the time to tame it in days. “Just sitting here,” I say, unsure what else to offer up.

She rolls her eyes at me. “No, what are youdoing?” she asks, as if asking the same question again will somehow clarify it for me. She gives me a pointed look.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I admit.

“I mean, why aren’t you telling my sister how you feel?” she asks, huffing out her frustration.

What the hell, is she all-knowing?

I rub my hands over my face. “I don’t think she wants that.”

She looks up toward the sky and shakes her head. “Listen, I don’t know how many times I have to play matchmaker or whatever the hell this overtime is where I have to come back and keep you on track, but my sister is feeling something, too.”

I sit up straighter, eyeing her. “She told you that?”

“Of course not, but I know,” she says, and I slump back down. “No, you listen to me, I know what I’m talking about. I know she feels something.”

“She could be feeling a lot of things,” I say, stating the obvious.

“And she could be feeling what you feel,” Harper says.

I think about that for a moment.

Is it possible?

Could a woman like Lyla feel something for me?

“She has a life somewhere else,” I argue.

Harper waves her hand in the air, dismissing the fact. “An inconvenience.”

I huff. “Right, just a tiny thing.”

“You listen to me. When it comes to love, almost everything that stands in its way is a minor inconvenience to be dealt with. As for the two people in love? If they really want it, they’ll move mountains to make it work,” she says.

“Heaven and earth,” I mutter under my breath.

“What?”

“Nothing, just something I said to her before,” I say.

“So, do you know what you’re doing now?” she asks.

I nod my head. “Yeah, I got a pretty good idea,” I say, standing from the porch swing.

“Good,” she says, disappearing back into the kitchen door as though we’ve just settled the most mundane topic.

I step off the porch to go find Lyla. I’m pretty sure she’s still on her run, so she could be anywhere, but I know her route well enough to hunt her down.

I round the barns, but she hasn’t made it this far yet.

---