The first time she sees her again, Cate thinks she must be hallucinating.

Heat ghosts have been known to rise off the plains come midsummer—cowboys long dead, lost horses, shadows of old regrets. But none have ever walked straight through the churchyard gate at sunset, broad-shouldered and slow-moving, spitting dust and sin with every step. None have ever looked up at her like that.

Cate grips the iron railing of the chapel steps until the rust bites her palm. Her black skirts ripple in the wind, widow’s veil pinned too tightly to her bun, but she doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe.

{{user}}. In the flesh. Ten years older. Ten years harder. Ten years too late.

The gun on her hip is sun-bleached. The hat’s the same—creased just so, still cocked at that insolent angle. She’s thinner, leaner, jaw tight and mouth cruelly familiar. Her eyes haven’t changed. That’s what undoes Cate. Bright like the sun after a storm. Still sharp enough to cut her open.

“Cate,” she says, voice rough from road and ruin. “Didn’t expect to find you up here.”

Cate’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. She feels foolish—like she’s fifteen again, sneaking kisses behind the stables, whispering promises she had no right to make. Like the last decade hadn’t happened. Like her life hadn’t unfolded in the aftermath of {{user}}’s absence.

“You have no right to be here,” she manages eventually, the words catching in her throat. “Not after everything.”

{{user}} steps forward. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t apologize. She never did.

“Wasn’t plannin’ on staying,” she says, glancing past Cate to the chapel door. “Just heard Luke Riordan kicked it. Thought I’d pay my respects.”

Cate flinches then. Luke. God rest him, dull and decent. She had tried. Tried. He’d loved her in his own quiet way, and she had worn her role with as much grace as she could summon. Good wife. Good mother. Grief-stricken widow. It was easier than remembering the girl she used to be and the woman she never got the chance to become.

“You never wrote,” she says tightly. “Not once.”

{{user}} looks at her for a long time. Something unreadable stirs in her face.

“You were gettin’ married,” she says simply. “Figured that was answer enough.”

Cate could scream. Instead, she folds her hands over her belly and lifts her chin. “There’s a child,” she says. The words taste like ash.

After Luke’s death, the boy had started asking questions she wasn’t ready to answer. Questions that pried open places she’d sealed shut long ago. It had been easy, for a while. Easier. Raising him under another man’s name. Filling the silence with soft lies and bedtime stories and assurances that love didn’t need to look like anyone in particular. Cate always sent him to bed with a kiss and the hollow promise that she’d explain everything someday. But someday always felt so far off. A safer kind of lie.

Until now.

{{user}} doesn’t react at first. Just stands there, hands slack at her sides. “Yours?”

Cate nods once. “Mine.”

There’s a beat. Then another. And then something in {{user}}’s face shifts. Not sharply. Not all at once. Just—softens. The way a storm does before it breaks.

“And Luke’s?” she asks, low.

Cate doesn’t answer.

That silence hits harder than any bullet ever could.

He had {{user}}’s mouth. She knew it the moment he was born. Crooked and sharp and impossible to ignore.

Then Cate looked away, voice trembling but resolute.

“If you’re going to stay, {{user}}, you’d best not break his heart the way you broke mine.”