Not clearly, not honestly, since the morning he found Sarah's blue shawl caught on that fence post, waving at him like it was trying to say goodbye. Not love, not yet. He wasn't fool enough, even now, even here, to call it that, but something. something that felt for the first time in five long, silent years, uncomfortably, dangerously close to hope. And somewhere out past the ring of warriors, sleeping around his cabin, past the dark canyon country, past everything Wade thought he already knew. For certain about the world and the people in it, a truth was still waiting, patient, unhurried.
It would not stay buried much longer. Dawn came up gray, then gold, then that particular shade of orange the desert only wears for about 4 minutes before it decides to just be hot again. Wade hadn't slept. Not really. He'd stopped counting the hours somewhere around the third time he checked Autumn Sky's fever and found it finally holding steady.
Steady was good. steady meant she was going to live, which meant Wade Callaway now had exactly two days left to prove his whole heart to a man who'd spent his life learning the hard way not to trust anybody who looked like Wade. Two days. He stood in the doorway watching the light change over 200 sleeping warriors and one very much awake pair of sentries and thought not for the first time that a man's entire life could apparently turn itself inside out in less time than it took most folks to plan a barn dance. He'd made his decision sometime past 3 in the morning, sitting in that one hard chair, watching Autumn Sky's chest rise and fall steady in the lamplight. There wasn't any other decision to make.
Not really. He'd known what he had to give up the moment. Grey Talon rode off with those words three days. Prove your heart still hanging in the air behind him. Except knowing a thing and being ready to actually do it were two very different animals.
Because the spring wasn't just water. It was two years of solitude. Two years of a secret that had kept him fed and alive. and in some strange way company out here where company of any other kind had stopped being an option. Giving it up meant giving up the one thing in this whole desert that had ever fully belonged to him and nobody else. And giving it up to the very people he'd spent five years quietly blaming for the worst morning of his life.
That particular irony wasn't lost on him. sat heavy on his chest the whole night through, right alongside everything else keeping him from sleep. So he hadn't slept, just sat, watched the light change, waited for whatever came next, the way a man waits out a storm he can already hear coming, but can't yet see. Grey Talon returned exactly when he'd said he would. Dawn, no earlier, no later, like the man ran on some private clock the rest of the world hadn't been let in on. He wasn't alone this time.