I did, in fact, go back to California one more time.

I couldn't leave the office for good until Alice came back, and besides, Jasper and Alex weren't going to keep taking turns feeding Davy Don't forever. I made arrangements to donate most of my furniture and kitchen stuff to a local mission upon my lease ending in the spring. I spent a lot of time helping Alice finish setting up her nursery. I bought Preston a Texas Rangers onesie online and had it shipped to Alice's house while we painted his room a brilliant emerald green and put peel and stick safari wallpaper on one wall. Jasper was for hiring the nursery decorating out but Alice said she needed more to do or she was going to strangle the neonatologist who wouldn't yet release their baby, so we drank energy smoothies and complained about how badly behaved some of our authors were while we hung shelves and slotted little board books like "Goodnight, Moon" and "Harold and the Purple Crayon" into place.

I did weekly calls with a therapist I liked. I texted with Edward multiple times a day, and at night, we facetimed. It wasn't the same, and he said he understood, but we would both be more than ready for little Preston to come home and Alice to go back to work part-time. I would be working, too, just remotely from Oklahoma, as soon as things in LA were settled.

I was fiddling with the solitaire, which I had taken to wearing on my hand instead of on a chain around my neck, when one of Edward's Facetime calls buzzed my back pocket. It was late, after eleven at night, and I had almost given him up for the day.

"Hey!" I still felt giddy whenever I saw him. All of that murky, disgusting self-loathing that used to choke me when I looked at him had finally disappeared. Things weren't perfect; I sure wasn't. But they were moving in the right direction.

"Sorry, I'm late."

I could see it right away – the pulsing heartache in his eyes, the dark smudges of circles under them and the redness of the whites.

"Edward," I whispered, speaking quietly to try to get an honest response out of him. "Have you been crying?"

His long fingers raked at his reddish gold hair. He wasn't wearing his hat either. "No!" Lashes as long as spider legs swept down across his eyes in the dim light of the reading lamp in our old living room. "Yes. I just...it's been a tough day. I don't rightly know why. I just miss him. I was working at the lower set of barns, and it got me thinkin.' You know he told me I should've married you four years ago when I gave you the promise ring? God, bless it, I should've listened to him then. I should've done every single thing he ever told me to do."

I touched the screen, wishing I could reach through it to kiss his jaw and plant my hand over the slow rhythm of his heart. "Well, why didn't you?"

He blinked at me. "I was young. And stupid. And afraid."

Unable to suppress a hard laugh, I smirked. "Well, I ain't arguing with none of that. But do you care to elaborate, Cullen?"

His stare held the dying Oklahoma winter in its depths. "I wanted to be more for you, okay? More than what Guv gave me, I mean. Your mama, she's – her. I didn't want to ask you when all I had to offer was what I would have one day when Guv was gone. I wanted to build things up. I wanted to be worth something. Somebody you could be proud of and not have to defend all the time to your mama and her people."

"I swear to God, men are idiots. I didn't care what Mama thought then, and I don't care now. All I ever wanted was for us to be a family."

He swiped at his eyes. "I never said I was smart. I think we covered that at Christmas, Bells, when you refused to go marry me before you left, remember?"

"I am not getting married at the courthouse," I reminded him. "I plan to marry once, and it will be in a church in front of God and all of our nosey neighbors and all the ranch people." I paused, twisting a lock of hair around one finger as he rolled his reddened eyes at me. I had to ask. I couldn't not. "What did Guv say? Back then, I mean. About marrying me?"

He picked his hat up from off screen and pulled it back down into place on his head. It was a dark brown felt number with a burnished orange band that made his green eyes seem to come alive on my phone.

"He said Essie May married him when he had five head of cattle and a broken-down Chevy to his name. He said women like y'all see more than the lines in a checking account. He said your mama would hate me if I was the king of England or if I owned the Dallas Cowboys. He said if I messed around 'till I lost you, even he wouldn't be able to fix it for me."

I said nothing. There were tears rolling down his face in earnest, making wavering, shiny lines down his sculpted cheeks and glowing slightly in the lights of the tree he'd apparently not got round to taking down.

He cried quietly, with a regret that I could not quite understand since both my parents, imperfect as they were, still lived. Licking my lips, I said the only thing I could think to say.

"I love you, Edward. And so does Guv. He always did. He still does."

Roughly wiping his face with the back of his hand, he sighed. "I love you, too. And I know he did, but damn, why'd he have to go and leave me? I know it's like Essie May says and it was a good, long life and all that, but it wasn't enough. He didn't see the new pole barn that'll be done in the spring. I want to take on dairy cows, and I can't ask him what he thinks. I got that shipment of wild horses coming in for Em to work with, the rescues Guv paid for, and he won't see them when they're unloaded." His voice grew softer. "He didn't get to see us married. I feel like ever day is just a damned reminder that he's not here. What if I mess everything up? Guv was so special. Bigger'n life. I can't do what he did. I ain't him."

"You can't be Guv. Nobody ever will be. You just got to take everything he taught you and be you. If he didn't think you could do it, you'd of knowed it. Who ever didn't know exactly what he thought of them? He damned well adored you from the time you showed up. He told Daddy one time that he felt like you were God's gift to him after Robert died in Vietnam – a way for him to do a better job, to have another chance with a Cullen, another son."

He put the phone down, face up, and while I stared at the plaster and beams of the ceiling on the phone screen, I could hear him quietly sobbing. I couldn't help the tears that began to slip down my own cheeks.

Instead of a remaining spouse will, everything had gone to Edward. Well, almost all of it. A couple of million went to the state veteran's hospital and another couple to the wild horse rescue he'd become so interested in before he passed. Emmett's home, a mid-century rancher on the west end of the ranch, had been deeded to him with the surrounding 20 acres. The balance, an incalculable amount of money, investments, real estate, holdings, and more, was Edward's. There had been a letter, he'd said, where Guv had written that he knew Essie May would be taken care of in her own home until her death, as they both wanted it. He'd also told Edward to bring me home from California even if it required rope, or worse, groveling. He'd told him he expected grandchildren, whether blood or adopted, within a couple years or he would send plagues. How he'd known about the babies and their losses, we would never know, but I suspected he and Essie May had both known, and in their quiet way, prayed over us at night. It was entirely possible that our life together was a direct result of years of their prayers. I thought the whole world was probably strung together with duct tape and the prayers of well-meaning grandparents, or in their case, elderly uncles and aunts.

He also told Edward that God loved him, and so did he. And at the end of the day, did much else really matter?

I didn't think so, anyway. I wasn't sure about adoption, but I also wasn't against it. Time would show us the best way. That spring, the most important thing seemed to be that we were together again.

Baby Preston was home and keeping Alice and Jasper busy in a way that they, as DINKs (dual income, no kids) had never realized was possible. On zoom, Alice showed me how she'd put a couch and a playpen in her expansive office for those times when her nanny was just not enough and for those many days when she had to have a rest in the afternoon.

We would end up marrying that December, deciding the family, and indeed the whole ranch, needed a happy event to look forward to instead of always associating the holiday with the anniversary of Guv's death. We had set the date for December 22. Alice would be my matron of honor, while Rosalie was my maid of honor. They would spend most of the week leading up tp the wedding fussing and fitting over everything from the way to arrange the guest book to when to do the garter toss. They would also become fierce friends.

But that spring, I was back home in Oklahoma where I belonged when the wild horses Guv had spared from starvation and eventual slaughter came out of the trailers on the back of two 18-wheelers.

Edward had shifted some of the cattle off 100 acres as the start of a small preserve for them. Emmett, who had horses as deeply in his blood as gears and motor oil, looked like a kid at Christmas as they raced out of the trailers and stood watching the ten or so of us gathered to get a look at them. Standoffish and skittish, they pawed the earth, tasting the wind with their velvet noses. With his final act, Guv had done what he'd been doing his entire life, given more lost souls second chances.

Shades of brown, black, white, roan, and pie-bald, they were a Remington painting come to life. I had never seen such power and grace so close before. Edward stood beside me, his thumb making circles in my palm in his excitement. The animals had become a passion for him. He'd spent so much time researching them, trying to understand their migration patterns, their needs, and how to handle enclosures for animals that were not meant to be fenced in.

I felt like those horses a lot that spring, new and wobbly, and maybe a little lost. Coming home didn't mean everything that had made me run was fixed. My womb was still as barren as the fields in November. My OBGyn swore this was not necessarily a forever thing. I was still young, she said. I'd been through a lot. My body and my mind needed time to heal old wounds. I should focus on things that made me happy, she'd said, and stop counting days and cycles and supplements. My therapist agreed, prescribing Zoloft in a small dosage and copious amounts of sunshine and exercise.

Almost daily, I took sunset walks with Buck and Davy Don't, which Davy Pissed seemed to adore since it gave him at least one hour of dog-free napping to count on. I walked usually to wherever Edward was for a while, to watch him work where I could do so unobserved. I didn't know why things had happened the way they had. I could only be grateful, especially that day as the horses began to stomp and scatter toward the hills, manes streaming out in the wind behind them like flags, that second and third and fourth chances were possible.

Edward leaned down, his hat shading our faces from the sun, and kissed me with all the hope and freedom of the moment.

"What're you thinking about?" he asked, his lips near my ear. He tasted of peanut butter and lemonade.

"Nothing. Everything? You."

His arms enfolded me, wrapping me up with love and promise. "Yeah?" The wind caught his laugh and played it back to me like a well-loved melody from a long time ago. "Me, too."

The end.

Thank you for reading and for waiting for me to finish this story in the way it deserved to be told.

If you are missing a loved one this Christmas, you are not alone.

And they are never truly gone.