“Everybody likes to be known. Heck, its why people roll their car window down when their favorite song comes on. They're telling everybody, 'Hey, hear this? This is me.”

“On the best nights, he’d appear outside the bookstore window and wait for me to unlock the door. He usually hadn’t had time to shower between doing things with cattle and horses and coming to find me, and he looked older than us and stronger than us.”

“Hearing my brother’s words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss—wild and wired with no place to put those feelings.”

“I’ve known her long enough to know that this was purely intentional.” He peered sideways at me, judging my reaction. “I like her just fine, but you should watch yourself around her. Tennyson is given to obsession, and her obsessions tend to run toward trouble. It’s kind of a Wyoming thing to push the whole ‘Wild West’ routine to its limits.”

“Then let me be your mercy,” he said. “I’ll never be able to give you smart answers about why we suffer, but I can come into your world and try to be some kind of help to you.”

“My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin. He slid it across the counter to me—Don’t worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.”

“I smiled at him. Not even Wyatt would have known how to be this honorable when talking about a girl that had hurt him.”