Their Wander Canyon Wish

by Allie Pleiter

  Chaz’s expression told Wyatt he didn’t believe that for a second, but at least his stepbrother kept his opinion to himself.

  The side door swung open and Dad came into the kitchen. “Wyatt’s car is out front.”

  “No kidding,” Wyatt said, wishing this hadn’t turned into the world’s most uncomfortable family meeting. At least try to be nice. “G’morning, Dad.”

  “’Morning to you, too, stranger.” Dad’s face was at once pleased and puzzled. “There’s a car coming up the drive.”

  Wyatt downed the last of his coffee. “That’ll be Marilyn and the girls.” He sent a pleading expression to Yvonne and Pauline. “Please?”

  Yvonne shrugged. “Of course. We’ll help however we can.”

  Dad hung his hat on the pegs by the door. “Someone want to tell me what on earth is going on?”

  “As soon as I know it myself, Dad.” Wyatt reached for the door handle as he heard the crunch of tires on the gravel. “I’ll send the girls in and take a walk with Marilyn.” He pointed toward the paper. “Hide that, if you don’t mind.” It struck him as a sick twist that Marilyn’s life had been shaken loose by words. By something people read.

  He pushed out the door to find Maddie scrambling out of the SUV. “Your cows are funny-looking. Can we see them up close?”

  “They’re so furry!” Margie said as she climbed out the other side. He was glad to see the girls seemed oblivious to what had happened. Marilyn, on the other hand, looked as if she was barely holding it together. He tried to let his gaze steady her as he accepted hugs from the girls. Their innocent happiness sank to the deepest corners of his chest and made it hard to breathe.

  “Head on inside, okay? Ms. Yvonne and my stepmom have stuff in there for you.”

  Without another word, he took Marilyn’s hand and pulled her across the driveway toward the small creek that ran alongside the pasture. She offered no resistance. In fact, she started to cry before they were even fully out of sight of the house.

  Once he got her to the quiet little grove, Wyatt didn’t even have to think. He just pulled her into his arms and let her cry. The details could wait. The facts could stand aside until she let out whatever she’d been holding in on behalf of the girls. He felt that wall he’d seen her force up come cracking down around them, felt her fear rise up and make her shake against his chest.

  Crying women usually irritated him—mostly because it was usually something he did that made them cry—but this felt altogether different. Tender and honorable were such gushy words, but they described the sense of pride he felt at being able to be there for her. To stand guard over her while her world fell apart. It shocked him and felt good at the same time. He felt no need to search for the clever remark. In fact, he felt no need to speak at all.

  After a long while she pushed off his now-damp chest, sniffling into her shirtsleeve and running embarrassed hands through her hair. She looked undone, and it undid something in him. He realized, in the small act of brushing a lock of hair off her blotchy cheek, that he cared about her. Deeply. Who would have ever thought?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice thin with embarrassment. She tried to pull away from him, but he refused to let her go. “I can’t believe I lost it like that.” She looked out over the bubbling stream and the peaceful setting. “I’ve been terrified of this day for months.”

  He sat down on the large stone that had been his favorite hiding spot for years, pleased to share it with her. At his gesture of invitation, she sat down next to him and hugged her arms to her chest.

  “So you knew?” It was a tricky question, seeing as he didn’t actually know what Marilyn knew.

  She recoiled at that, pulling her knees up to hug them. “I think on some level I always knew Landon would fall in with whoever would further his career. It was easier to pretend I didn’t, though.” She looked up at Wyatt, scrambling to explain. “He was so different when I married him. Do you think anyone will believe that?”

  Wyatt thought of all the things he’d done to win over a woman, all the things he used to exaggerate or even lie about, and felt the edges of his conscience blacken like burning paper. Landon had bowled her over, swept her off her feet according to plan. It was so easy to see because he’d done it himself. And not on some agenda, but just because he could. Did she know what he now knew? Could he bear to break it to her if she didn’t? He knew what it felt like to be merely the means to an end, and it was one of life’s deepest cuts.

  He settled on the closest thing to the truth he could stomach. “He fooled a lot of people.”

  “And we all know how people hate to be fooled.”

  “Nobody’s going to put this on you, Mari.” It felt like that was what he was supposed to say.

  She called him on it. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. I’m not to blame, but we both know how this sort of thing sticks. The talking that will stop when I enter the room. The whispers. They’ll wonder how much I know, how much I knew all along.” She gave the last two words a bitter edge.

  “Okay, it might be bad at first, but people will find something else to talk about soon enough.” He gave her shoulder the smallest of playful bumps. “If you want, I can go do something scandalous by Tuesday. You know, draw their fire.”

  He hoped to make her laugh, but she only gave a sad little whimper. “Each time Mountain Vista gobbles up a new ranch it will start all over again.” She pulled in a breath. “We’ll probably have to leave town.”

  “Don’t leave.” His plea was instantaneous. Alarmingly close to desperate. “I mean,” he backpedaled, “if you leave, they win.”

  She looked at him with tired eyes. “What does that matter? We’ve already lost.”

  * * *

  Wyatt’s expression sharpened. “Lost? You haven’t lost anything. Landon took something from you. He did it. Not you. He...” Wyatt pushed up off the rock, pacing the lush grass in front of the picturesque little creek. “He doesn’t get to take you down with him. He doesn’t deserve to.”

  The power behind his words shot through her. How long had it been since she felt like anyone was fighting in her corner? Life felt as if the hole Landon left behind was so large it swallowed her up along with it. She didn’t feel anything close to brave, or coping, or any of those valiant adjectives people liked to associate with young widows. She was just hanging on. And doing a terrible job of it besides.

  Suddenly one secret scrambled to get out of her, clawing its way up from the darkest corner of her heart. “Do you know what’s in a box at the top of my closet?”

  “Huh?” He stopped his pacing and looked at her, rightfully stumped by the odd response to what he’d just said.

  The panic that had hummed just below her control, the one she’d been fighting on some level for months, finally escaped. “In the back of my closet, in a box with a lock. Do you know what’s in there?”

  Wyatt stood facing her, somehow sensing the importance of what she was going to say. The green creek bank was such a pretty scene. It felt criminal to let something so ugly out into the world in a spot like this. And yet somehow she couldn’t hold it back, even though she’d never told anyone, nor thought she ever would. A deep tremble started in the small of her back and worked its way up her spine alongside the words. “It’s a letter. Almost a year old. Written by me. To him. Telling him how unhappy I was. Telling him I wanted to leave him.”

  She’d said it. Out loud. The only thing darker than who Landon really had been was who she was for wanting to leave him. To break her marriage vows. To walk away, just because she was unhappy. Marilyn waited for the shame to rise up out of the ground and swallow her whole.

  “My God,” Wyatt said.

  “No,” she shot back, not bothering to stem the tears that now came. “God was nowhere in it. That’s the farthest thing from who God is. Who He’d want me to be.”

  W
yatt crouched down in front of her, looking up into her face with eyes that said a dozen things. Surprise, defiance, a stunning tenderness, and a care she felt helpless to accept. “You never gave it to him.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But you kept it.”

  She’d never really worked out why. “I suppose I thought it was my weapon against him. If I put down on paper how I really felt but could hang on long enough to never actually give it to him, that made me the better person.” It seemed utterly absurd now that she said it out loud.

  Wyatt took one of her hands. “You are the better person. How can you not see that?”

  “How? I mean, which is worse? My wanting to leave him or my not having the strength to even tell him I wanted to?”

  He took both her hands now, clasping them tightly. “He didn’t deserve you.”

  “Don’t say that. You don’t know that.”

  “I do know that. Even before this morning I knew that. You’re amazing. You’re all those things you think you aren’t. You’re strong and you love your amazing girls and you’re fighting for their future.” He looked down for a minute, and she was grateful to catch her breath out of the powerful pull of his gaze. He shifted his weight, as if readying himself, or deciding something. When he looked back up at her, something had hardened in his eyes. A determination of sorts. “Why did you marry Landon?”

  It seemed an odd question. “I loved him. He made all these wonderful promises about what our life would be like together. He was a star, a rising shining star who chose little, ordinary me.”

  “Why did he marry you?” He said the words slowly, with a strange caution she didn’t understand.

  “He loved me. He always used to say I was the perfect wife for a hundred reasons.” She realized, as the words left her, that she couldn’t remember the last time Landon said that to her. Just the opposite, as a matter of fact. He seemed to have a hundred reasons why she didn’t measure up.

  “Mari.” She didn’t know how to push back against what the sound of his saying her name did to her. How to stop the glow it had started. “Did you know that one of those reasons was that the honchos at Mountain Vista promised to back his Senate campaign if he married a local girl to grease the wheel for them?”

  The tremble from the base of her spine racked through her entire body. Marilyn looked for signs of lying in Wyatt’s eyes and found only regret. “That’s not true.” The words were more of a weak gasp than a loyal wife’s declaration.

  Wyatt swallowed hard. “Well, I don’t know if it’s true, but this morning I heard two executives talking out on the golf course at Mountain Vista, and they said just that. The guy said he’d struck a deal with Landon that if he made himself a Wander Canyon local—to pave the way for the resort, I suppose—they’d fund his Senate run.”

  She wanted to be sure it wasn’t true. She craved to know deep down in her bones that Landon’s love had always been the fairy tale she’d thought it to be. But the words denying that horrible possibility stayed stuck in her throat, unable to come.

  It couldn’t be. She couldn’t have been used in that way, duped for all those years about something that ought to be so deep-down knowable as whether or not your husband really loved you. Whether the father of your children really loved his family, or just saw them as a means to an end.

  She ought to be able to stand up and yell “How dare you!” or some other righteous thing. To point a finger at Wyatt’s pained expression and defend her late husband, stand by Maddie and Margie’s father. Only the sickening possibility of what Wyatt had said seemed to swirl around her. No amount of dread dampened the fact that it was possible. It explained a thousand little details that had poked pinpricks of doubt into her. He used to say the strangest things when he got angry, as if life had cheated him out of some great deal. It couldn’t be, could it?

  It wasn’t one big lie, was it? She had loved Landon. She was sure of that. But she could also no longer deny that somewhere along the line that love had grown cold. Did it make it better or worse to think his affections had simply been calculated all along?

  “Mari,” came Wyatt’s voice out of the storm of emotions surrounding her. “Talk to me. Do you think it’s true?”

  If it was possible to feel yourself disappear, that’s what she felt. As if every breath of air she scraped into her lungs somehow made her less solid. She forced the words out of her mouth. “It could be.” Saying them somehow made the whole thing more real, and she felt slightly ill.

  “I thought maybe you knew. Or guessed. It didn’t sound like things were so perfect between you and Landon, and you blamed yourself so much.”

  “Everybody will know.” The words were somewhere between a gasp and a whisper.

  “Not from me they won’t. Okay, there’s the business stuff in the paper, but no one needs to ever know what I heard this morning.”

  She gave him a sour look. “They will. Landon’s a target now. It will come out. Secrets always do. And we’ll go right down with him.” She went to pull her hands from his. “All I had to stand on was who he was, who we were, and now that’s gone.”

  Wyatt would not release his grip. Instead, he clasped her hands more tightly, and for a moment Marilyn felt as if they were the only thing keeping her from dissolving into thin air. “That’s not true,” he declared. “You’re so much more than who he was. Look at me. I just walked away when it got tough, but you, you stuck it out. You took whatever it is Landon did and made it a family.” He shook her hands as he held them, as if pulling her back from the dread swallowing her. “Why can’t you see how strong you are? How you deserve so much more than what Landon did to you?”

  She couldn’t see it. Not today. Today she wanted to run and hide. The prospect of driving off this ranch and walking into town or church or anywhere knowing what was splayed across the newspaper this morning? She couldn’t begin to stomach it.

  “I deserved anything people said about me,” Wyatt went on. “But you? I won’t let them. Give me five minutes with anyone who dares to say one thing about you and the girls. They’ll find out what the end of a Walker temper really looks like.”

  His words sounded brave and wonderful, but they were useless. If her work in public relations had taught her anything, it was that people loved to pull down a rising star. The revelation of one fault would lead to the hunt for more. And it had become crystal clear that there were plenty to be found about Landon Sofitel.

  Suddenly Wyatt was pulling her to her feet. “There’s only one thing to do. And we’re gonna do it. I may not be good at lot of things, but I’m really good at this.”

  “What?”

  “Defiance. You’re looking at Wander Canyon’s reigning champion.” He paused in thought for a moment. “It’s Sunday. Isn’t there one of those afternoon outdoor church services at WCC today?”

  What did that have to do with anything? “I think so.”

  “Okay, then. We’re going.”

  She shook her hand. “What? No!”

  “Yep. You and I and Margie and Maddie and Dad and Pauline and maybe even Chaz and Yvonne. You’re gonna walk in there with your head held high like you own the place. You’re gonna show them you’re everything Landon wasn’t.”

  That was ludicrous. “You can’t be serious.”

  Wyatt started pulling her toward the house. “Marilyn Sofitel, I have never been more serious about anything in my life. And you know what we’re going to do after church?”

  “Curl up into a ball and die?” She was only half kidding.

  He kept walking, tugging her along. “No, we’re going to ride the carousel. Because I will get it working before I pick you up for church. And I am not taking no for an answer, so don’t bother trying.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Half an hour later, Wyatt looked up into the high rafters of the building that housed the Wander Canyon Carous
el. If he had a church, it might feel a bit like this room. If Wander was always watching, could it be such a stretch to think God was always watching, too? Lord, if You are, now’d be a good time to show up and show off. This carousel has to work today. It has to.

  He tightened the final bolts and worked the chain into place over the teeth of the gears. He’d waved goodbye to Marilyn and the twins as they left the ranch and then headed straight here. This machine was going work if it was the last thing he did.

  He was going to church service. He’d just said a prayer. He’d come to care for a woman more deeply than he ever thought possible. What was God up to here? I’m so wrong for her. All this is so far out of my territory. Church was at four—two hours from now—and he’d been at this for hours. He admitted the fact he’d been tamping down all morning: I’m terrified.

  Wyatt was about to throw the lever that turned on the carousel’s lights when he heard the creak of the building’s door pushing open. He looked up to find his father walking in. Dad looked as surprised to be here as Wyatt was to find him.

  “How’s it going?” Dad asked. “Got it working yet?”

  “I think I may have got it this time. I was just about to throw the switch.” He was sure Pauline would have said something about the perfect timing of Dad’s appearance.

  Dad walked farther into the room. “That was a fine thing you did this morning. Seeing to Marilyn Sofitel and her girls like you did.”

  Dad was so frugal with praise that his short statements felt monumental. Things had still been prickly between them since that morning months ago when he’d stormed off the ranch. It left Wyatt a bit stumped as to how to respond. “Um...thanks.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  This was the closest thing to an olive branch Dad could offer. Wyatt felt almost sorry there wasn’t anything to do but turn the carousel on and see if it finally worked. Could that be enough? “You want to throw the switch?”

  If a single pair of questions could feel like reconciliation, this moment was the start. His father gave him a look that was a mix of apology, admiration and affection. Wyatt felt his breath hitch when Dad threw the power switch and the hundreds of tiny lights turned the space gold and glowing. Turning the lights on was only half the battle, however. The real triumph was in getting the carousel in motion. Wyatt pointed to the lever that engaged the finicky motor. “Go ahead and pull it.”