Yet I found myself looking for him. Searching the crowd for him. Sure, I could call him, but what would I say? Hi. Missed you. Killed anybody amusing lately? You just didn’t trifle with someone who reported to archangels. So I remembered and I missed him and tried to put the pieces back together. Too bad they’d all been broken into jagged shapes that cut when I tried to connect the edges.

“You all right?” Chance asked, coming up beside me.

The mountains were beautiful, dark green and pointed like weapons against the darkening sky. Where I’d grown up, it was relatively flat and the countryside tended toward swampland. Until coming here, I’d never lived at high altitude. It changed everything from cooking to taking a walk. Everything felt like more of an achievement at seven thousand feet.

Including moving day.

I nodded. “Just tired. You fit a lot of boxes in the Mustang.”

“I’m a good packer. We used to move around a lot.”

“You and Min?”

His silence felt like an affirmative. Then I wondered why I didn’t know more about him, why I’d permitted his reticence. A woman more confident of her self-worth wouldn’t; she’d insist on learning about her lover. And if he didn’t care to share, she’d move on, looking for someone who wanted to be a partner, not a manager. The mistakes in our rearview didn’t all belong to Chance.

At length, he offered, “I think she was hiding from someone.”

“Your father…or the Montoyas?”

“Both? Min doesn’t talk about the past much.”

“And you didn’t press her.”

He shook his head. “I never wanted to disappoint her. She’d get this look, like I should know better than to ask. Like it was…impolite.”