“I can’t do this. I can’t watch them come in here and look at me like I’m…”
“Damaged?”
“Yeah. That.” He exhaled heavily. “You’re the only one brave enough to say it. The rest give me platitudes. They tell me I’ll heal, when they have no idea if I will or not. I see it in their eyes. They think I deserve this.”
“No one deserves this,” Lana told him softly. “Especially not you. But you’re the one going through it. No one can tell you how to feel, least of all the rest of our family. Focus on what you need, not what they say.”
“Is that how you’ve survived them so long? Tuning them out?”
Lana didn’t answer. Killian craned his neck around as much as the brace would allow. “Where’s Rick?”
“He left.”
“Left Chicago or left you?”
Her expression, so carefully schooled into calmness, still gave her away.
“So that’s it? You’re going to sit there with that fake-ass pleasant smile pasted on your face and let him go? That idiot’s in love with you. Whatever his reasoning, he’s not leaving because he wants to.”
“Would you suggest I make a grand gesture? Beg him to take me back?”
Killian snorted. “Well, what grand gesture could Rick possibly make? Here, surrounded by them? We all feel like we aren’t enough. Even Aunt Jessica and Uncle Langston. None of us are good enough to run this place. None of us are as skilled as we need to be. The only one close is you. You’re the prodigal child, succeeding when the rest of us are silently screaming at the top of our lungs.”
“That’s not true,” Lana protested.
“Please, Cousin. I’m the court jester at best. The fool who is rolled out whenever strangers need entertainment.” Killian ran a hand over his face, scrubbing bruised skin roughly. “Do you think they’ll stick me in an office so I can pretend to have a job? Or set me up with a caretaker and forget about me except for the holidays?”
Her heart broke at the certainty in his voice.
“Don’t give up, Killian. You’re strong enough to get through this.”
“You’re the only one of us worth anything. If you’re giving up, what’s the point?”
Killian rested his head back on his pillow, staring up at the ceiling. Lana sat in her chair silently for a very long time. Then she rose to her feet, moved to the edge of his bed, and leaned over.
“If you hate it here, then heal.” When he wouldn’t look at her, Lana ignored his bruises and took his chin in her hand, forcing him to. “Heal enough to get out of here. I don’t know what happens next, but I know you don’t have to stay here. When it’s safe to travel, I have a whole town where you can go, where you won’t have to deal with them.”
There was enough of Killian left to pull his face out of her hand before holding her eyes challengingly. “I thought Moose Springs wasn’t your town.”
“Places don’t belong to us because of money. They belong to us because we love them. My heart is in Moose Springs. It’s my home, and I’m going home. When you’re ready, come home with me too.”
Pressing a kiss to his bruised forehead, Lana left Killian to decide for himself what he needed to do.
Her mother was leaning against the wall outside Killian’s room, within easy earshot of their conversation.
“I’m going back to Alaska,” Lana told Jessica. “I’ll be working out of the office I set up in Moose Springs for the foreseeable future.”
Jessica took her hands. “Lana, are you sure this is the right choice for you? Rick seems like a good man, but will this be enough?”
“This isn’t about him. It’s about me. I stood on a mountain, and I looked down at the problem. Do you know what I found? We’re the problem. I’m selling the Moose Springs properties to the business owners. Any of them who want to buy, I’ll negotiate with them myself. I’m putting control back in their hands.”
“And if I put in a vote to stop you?”
“It’s not your company,” Lana said. “It belongs to all of us. I’ll do what I have to and get the votes I need to push it through. I’m not sacrificing the town to Silas’s greed. He’s welcome to live his life as a pawn of the Montgomery Group’s revenue, but I’m more than that. Moose Springs is worth more than that. And if you’re smart, you’ll realize that the Montgomery Group is worth more than his greed too.”
For too many decades, the fate of Moose Springs had been in the hands of the wrong people. The Shaws, sitting in their gilded tower of a resort. The commercial property companies, sitting in Anchorage, counting their dollars. Her own hands and the hands of her family. People who simply didn’t understand.
It was time for Moose Springs to be in the right hands again: their own.
“You’re playing a dangerous game with your future, Lana. Are you sure he’s worth it?”
There wasn’t cruelty in her mother’s voice, just an honest question.
“I don’t know,” Lana said honestly. “But I know I am.”
“The town will shut your condos down, Lana,” her mother told her as Lana walked away. “All your work will have been for nothing.”
On the contrary. This might be the first business deal in her life that would be worth it.
* * *
The next time Lana offered to fly him first class, Rick was taking her up on it.
After a miserable trip back home in coach—in which his longest flight had been spent wedged in between two people his own size in the row closest to the rear bathroom—all Rick wanted to do was go home. Every single minute since leaving her in Chicago, Rick had questioned whether he’d done the right thing. Shouldn’t doing the right thing feel better? Because this felt like he’d been shredded from the inside out. He’d left her there to deal with her family alone. He’d left her there to deal with her hurt cousin alone. Instead of standing by her side, he’d bailed the first chance things looked like they could be tough.
What the hell was he thinking? What the hell was he doing? He should be on a plane back to Chicago right that minute.
But his choice had been made. Going back now would only make things worse, because nothing had changed. She still deserved better than having him and his town come between her and her family. No, Rick had to stay this course, no matter how terrible it made him feel.
After his flight finally landed in Anchorage, Rick got his snow-covered car out of the airport’s short term parking and drove back to Moose Springs, barely seeing the road.