Page 38 of Heart Like a Cowboy

“You want to talk about what you heard Remi and me saying?” Egan finally asked.

“No,” Alana was quick to answer.

It was ironic that if anyone knew what it was like to be cheated on, it was Egan, but there was shame that came with this whole mess. Along with the jabs of inadequacy that she hadn’t been enough for her husband.

“If you know,” Alana added, “don’t tell me if Jack was in love with the other woman.”

OrMiss Things Just Happenedas Remi had called her. Alana smiled a little at that. Apparently, Remi hadn’t been a fan of Jack’s cheating, either.

“If she was stunningly beautiful, I don’t want to know,” Alana went on, tossing the unplucked lazy daisy. “Ditto for keeping it to yourself if she was some kind of superhero who saved a bunch of people and brought about world peace.”

That came out as the snarky exaggeration she’d meant it to be, but it had an underlying cut to it. Because it might have been this woman’s bone-deep heroism and dedication to her country that had drawn Jack to her.

In those minutes she’d listened to Remi and Egan talking in the barn, she had heard Remi say that the woman had been an intel officer. Alana wasn’t sure exactly what a job like that entailed, but it was possible she had saved lives with something she’d done.

“I thought about going into the military,” Alana went on. “I mean, once Jack had decided that’s what he wanted to do, I thought about going in. The Air Force has dietitians so I could have basically been doing the same job I have now. He talked me out of it, though, because he said it would be hard for us to get assignments together.”

“It probably would have been,” Egan agreed.

Even though it was true, Alana still made a “yeah right” sound, complete with an eye roll. “His argument was I could accompany him as a civilian to the bases where he was stationed and find work there. That’s all well and good except he was either deployed or on temporary duty most of the time, and there were assignments where spouses couldn’t go. After three years of that, I ended up back home where the plan was for him to visit as often as possible.”

And she’d thought Jack had done that. It turned out, though, that some of his “as often as possible” visits hadn’t been with her but rather this lover.

“If she was the kind of woman Jack wanted,” Alana heard herself confess, “one who was a fellow military officer with hero status, then I couldn’t have given him that even if I had been in the Air Force.”

Dietitians didn’t get many opportunities to save the world and gain hero status.

He made another of those sounds of agreement. “I feel the same way about Colleen’s guy. An artist and a poet. The closest I could come to that was making fun of Cal and Blue when we were fighting and I was throwing painted cow shit at them.”

Frowning, she looked at him. “You painted cow shit?”

Egan nodded. “Not the super fresh stuff but the partly dried piles. I spray painted them to look like land mines and used sticks to spear chunks that were solid enough for me to hurl.” He shrugged when her frown stayed in place. “Brothers don’t always have clean fights.”

Apparently not. Neither did sisters. “Colleen and I once got in a fight and threw kiddie makeup at each other. I beaned her between the eyes with a Polly Pocket lip gloss.”

For one too short moment, that made her smile, and then the other emotions returned with a vengeance. Her eyes burned, not from the rain but from the threat of the damn tears.

“When the grief started, I had no idea it’d go on this long,” she admitted. “It didn’t start out as me thinking about what it would be like three years from now. It began with me just getting through a second. Then, a minute. I built my way up to hours, then days. Nights. Weeks. But the grief has never gone completely away.”

“Yeah.” And that was all he said. All he needed to say.

Because Egan was dealing with it, too, only from a different perspective as the best friend. It wouldn’t do her any good to tell him that Jack’s death hadn’t been his fault. It wouldn’t help, either, if he clarified that he hadn’t been okay with Jack’s cheating. Alana had gotten the gist of his “not being okay” when she’d overheard the bits of his conversation with Remi. She’d seen his face, too, and Egan had not been a happy camper.

“Stating the obvious here, but you’re getting wet,” he pointed out. “So is your phone.”

He aimed a glance at her dress pocket where she had put her phone that was, indeed, getting a soaking. It was hard, though, for her to care about such things when it felt as if she’d stepped into a deep dark hole and couldn’t get out. In fact, Alana wasn’t sure she could even move at the moment.

The zigzag of lightning changed her mind. It slashed down from the dark clouds, and a rumble of thunder followed.

“Again, stating the obvious, but it’s probably not smart to be near water or these trees with the lightning,” Egan said.

“No,” she agreed, and on a heavy sigh, she turned to head toward her car before Egan stopped her by taking hold of her arm.

“We’d best go in my truck. With this downpour, the road will already be a muddy mess, and you’ll get bogged down. I can drop you off at work or home and then have one of the hands come out with the tow chain to get your car to you.”

He was right, of course, and Alana had in fact gotten stuck out here a year ago on another of her grief treks. She didn’t want to go through that right now when she was barely holding herself together. It didn’t matter so much if Egan saw her fall apart since he’d already witnessed it after she told him all about the final words she’d spoken to Jack.

“I’ll need my purse, though,” she said, snagging it from her car and putting her phone inside to try to salvage it. She dumped in the necklace and rings, too, and Alana vowed to either find a place to sell them or offer them to Tilly as keepsakes.

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