Page 49 of The Bride
“You’ve been acting a little different with me lately, and I wanted to make sure…”
Now she was tilting away from me. “Make sure what?”
“Ellie, are you really ready for April? For the divorce. Because it’s going to happen. I can’t see any way around that.”
She nodded. “I know. I’m ready for it. I want you to have your chance. You’ve worked so hard this year to make my place a success and to teach me everything you know, you deserve to be able to put all that work into something of your own. I know you have to go and do that.”
“I’m not dying, you know. I’m going ten miles south, remember?”
Again a nod, only she was looking out the window, not at me.
Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe this had nothing to do with a crush or seeing my dick or any of it. Maybe she was pulling away because she was scared about being on her own.
“Talk to me, Ellie. What are you thinking?”
She leaned her head back. “Sometimes it just hits me. I’m really all alone.”
That made me immediately angry. “You’re not. You’re always going to have me.”
She looked at me then, her smile gone, and I could see it in her eyes. All the sorrow and weight of her grief had changed her. Made her older, made her wiser. I missed goofy Ellie, but serious Ellie was a woman to be reckoned with.
“I’m not, Jake. I’m not always going to have you. And you, you are not always going to have me. I think we need to realize that. We think April twenty-second isn’t going to change anything, but it is. We should start preparing for that now.”
I didn’t say anything. How could I when I was essentially trying to get to the same point. Of course I had been worried about potentially hurting Ellie.
I really hadn’t considered how I was going to feel.
I thought I was going to feel like shit.
Thirteen
Ellie
March
On a scaleof one to ten, it was a full-on ten. Possibly maybe ten and a half.
Except I never do this. I never break the scale because I think it makes the scale invalid. Then any number is acceptable and representative of being bad or good.
What’s the difference between eleven and a thousand, really?
But for the first time, this seemed to warrant it.
Remember my obsession with the weather? I had started to ease up once we rolled into March. The worst cold should have been behind us.
They called this an anomaly. A major Arctic air mass that moved down over the Rockies with virtually no warning.
Right now the temperature was twenty below freezing, and it was snowing hard. The wind gusts were brutal. I couldn’t feel my hands despite being covered with heavy work gloves. I couldn’t see the house from the barn. I couldn’t see the pen from the barn, where Jake was working to save the calves.
All I knew was that this was bad. Because according to every prediction we’d gotten before the satellite kicked out, it was supposed to get worse.
Which made this storm on a scale of one to ten a full-on ten. And maybe a half.
I tried to focus on my work. I needed to put blankets on Petunia and Wyatt, make sure they had plenty of food. I had to thaw the trough water with boiling water I had hauled from the house to break up the ice so they could drink it. This would have to be done throughout the day and night as the water started to freeze almost immediately.
Of course, not realizing what was coming, Javier and Gomez had left before the storm. While their help would have been huge, we also didn’t have to worry about the generator powering the house and the bunk house.
All we had to do was make sure we could keep the calves as warm as possible. Which meant moving them from the pen to the barn. As many as we could fit. Jake knew from past storms the barn could hold about thirty.
