Linda Lael - Montana Creeds - Tyler

Angie’s dead. I’m so sorry. We found her at the Skylight Motel, on the old state highway. It was an overdose, Jake… .

Tyler had heard a wail, primitive and piercing, and thought it was Jake.

He’d only realized the sound was coming from his own throat when Dylan and Logan each took one of his arms and hauled him up off his knees, braced him between them.

Cassie squeezed his arm, hard, brought him back from the abyss, the place where the questions never stopped.

All of them started with the same word.

Why?

“What could be that bad?” he rasped. “A wife like Lily. A little girl like Tess. What would make a man throw them away?”

“You’re trying to understand again,” Cassie pointed out gently. “And there is no understanding, Tyler. People are fragile. They can break. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.”

Don’t try to understand.

How many times had he heard that advice, from how many people? Dylan, certainly. Logan, too. Even his late wife, Shawna, when she’d been trying to pull him out of some slump. And it wasn’t the first time Cassie had offered it, either.

The problem was, he couldn’t help going over the old ground, looking for clues. Analyzing. His mother’s suicide was the reason for so many things that had happened—and not happened—in his life. It drove him half-crazy sometimes, the need to know why she’d done it. Why she hadn’t been able to hold on, leave Jake, make a new start somewhere else.

“You’ll be seeing Lily, I suppose?” Cassie ventured.

“We’re having dinner tomorrow night,” Tyler answered, braced for more advice.

Leave it alone, Cassie had told him, after the breakup that summer, when he’d wanted to go back to Lily, beg her to forgive him for sleeping with Doreen, give him another chance.

Forget the girl, Jake had counseled. She’s too good for you, anyway .

Are you nuts? Logan had demanded, after bouncing him off the back wall of the barn a couple of times. Rolling in the hay with a waitress twice your age when Lily’s crazy about you?

Sometimes, the voices from the past crowded in like that, made Tyler want to put his hands over his ears. Not that that would have shut them out.

What had happened, had happened.

What was done, was done.

So why couldn’t he just let his poor mother rest in peace?

Why couldn’t he forgive her for breaking down that final time?

The realization hit him hard.

That was why he’d come home to Stillwater Springs, left the rodeo and the big-money stunt work and photo shoots behind, sold his big, empty house in L.A. and traded his Escalade for a junker that wouldn’t even run.

He’d come back to take on all the old ghosts, one by one or in a snarling pack, however they came at him. Win or lose, the fight was on.

Would he still be standing when it was all over?

There was only one way to find out.

And he was through running away.

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