A Cold Montana Christmas: Chapter Two

The Shape of Gone

COLD MONTANA CHRISTMAS: A CROSSFIRE CANYON NOVEL

A Cold Montana Christmas is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Copyright © 2021 by Mina Beckett

ebook ISBN: 978-1-7375127-0-7

Print ISBN: 978-1-7375127-1-4

Published by CurtissLynn Publishing

Cover and internal design by Shiver Shot Design

Editing by The Killion Group, Inc.

All rights reserved.

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Behind the Words: A Cold Montana Christmas- Chapter Two

There’s a particular kind of silence that follows heartbreak. It doesn’t scream. It hums, low and constant, beneath the surface of everything. That’s where Lauren lives when Chapter Two opens. Behind the steering wheel as she pulls up to the old ranch house where she once lived with Colton, behind a lifetime of memories, and behind a truth she’s not quite ready to face: some endings don't look like slamming doors. Some come wrapped in the soft ache of what might’ve been.

Writing this chapter meant slipping into that space, into the mind of a woman who once believed in forever, and now has to walk into the house where that dream was built, brick by brick. She isn’t naïve. She knows love alone isn’t enough. But she remembers what it felt like to believe it was.

The Lucky Jack Ranch was never just setting. It’s a memory keeper. A living, breathing reminder of everything Lauren gave, lost, and tried to reclaim. And when she steps onto that porch with a manila envelope in her bag and a storm behind her eyes, it’s not just about signing papers. It’s about reckoning. With herself. With him. With the woman she used to be.

I didn’t want her to be perfect. I wanted her to be real. The kind of woman who carries her guilt like a second skin, who can look at a man she still loves and doubt everything she once knew. The kind of woman who left, but also stayed, in all the invisible ways.

That’s the heart of second chances. They don’t start with flowers and apologies. They start with discomfort. With questions you don’t want to ask, and truths you can’t quite swallow. Lauren’s journey through that house, past memories that glow and wound in equal measure, is one of the most intimate things I’ve written.

Because loving someone—and losing them—doesn’t fade with time. It burrows. And sometimes, it brings you back to the same front door. Not to fix what’s broken, but to finally face what you ran from.

Thanks for walking into that house with her.

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CHAPTER TWO

The Lucky Jack. Lauren mused listlessly as she braked near the gravel in front of the ranch house and shoved the rental into Park. There hadn’t been a damn thing lucky about the place for her.

But God, how she’d loved the ranch.

She and Little Jack were the first to leave the cemetery after the service was over. But the front lawn of the ranch house was quickly filling with heavy-duty trucks and rusty four-wheel-drive vehicles.

When Colton’s red Ford rolled to an easy stop near the edge of the porch, Lauren tried fortifying herself against what was to come. She didn’t want to go inside, didn’t want to cry and run away as she had in the past. Barging through the door and throwing divorce papers in his face would be rude and provoke a scene. She preferred this to be cordial and as painless as possible.

He opened the driver’s door, planted a boot on the gravel, and stepped out. The black wool coat he wore molded to his formidable shoulders, reinforcing his muscular build and strength.

Seeing him had never gotten easier, though, logically, after eight years of separation, it should have.

Lauren loved him. That hadn’t diminished.

Her heart would always ache for him and for the life they could’ve had together.

“You okay, Mom?”

Her hands tightened around the steering wheel. She prayed Little Jack wouldn’t notice how they trembled and mustered a gentle smile for her son’s sake. “I’m fine, honey. It’s just been a hard day.” And it’s about to get a lot harder. She watched Colton escort Sue and the dark-haired woman she’d seen him with at the gravesite from his truck to the house.

Lauren had never had cause to be jealous. Colton had been a devoted fiancé, and she’d thought, a faithful husband. But he’s not your husband. And, biblically speaking, he hadn’t been her husband in over eight years.

“That’s Aunt Mia,” Little Jack offered before opening his door.

The Ritter clan was considerable. Jack Reid had several brothers and sisters. Colton had dozens of cousins strewn across Montana, but he was an only child. How dare he cover up his relationship with the woman by lying to their son! The simmering suspicion in Lauren’s chest boiled to scorn. “Aunt Mia, huh?”

“That’s what Dad said. I’ll see you inside.” He hopped from the Jeep, ran up the steps, and met Sue at the front door.

Lauren had wrestled with her decision, but after seeing Colton with Aunt Mia, she was sure that a divorce was the right thing to do.

But it didn’t feel right. Nothing about this felt right. You knew this wouldn’t be easy. Pull yourself together and get it done, she heard Big Tom Briggs say like he had a hundred times over the course of her childhood. But this wasn’t like falling off your bike or not getting picked for the cheerleading team.

This was a divorce. The end of what had been a wonderful and happy marriage. The finality of it meant her marriage would be over and not just resting on a rear burner. She’d held her ground for a short time and thought she was prepared to fight for her husband and her marriage.

But in the end, she’d run away from both.