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“Just let her come home to me.” She bowed her head, going back in time to Wyoming.
    The way Daisy had found out she was pregnant with the twins had been by peeing on a white plastic stick, waiting for the little window to turn blue.
    Blue as the big sky over the Wind River mountains, blue as the unknowable depths of James Tucker’s eyes, blue as the ocean she had missed back home.
    And as blue as the window of this other pregnancy test, the one Sage must have taken, the one that told Daisy Tucker the reason her sixteen-year-old daughter had run away.

Chapter Three
    J ames Tucker rode down the fingerbone ridge, dust swirling up from beneath the horse’s hooves. A few stunted cedars clung to these red rocks, sloping down to the bare brown rangelands. The Wind River mountains rose around him, and he galloped through their purple shadows on his way home for supper.
    He followed a dry creek bed over the barren desert-brown land. This was blood-soaked territory, the heart of Wyoming’s cowboy, Crow, Shoshone, and soldier history, and James had never lived anywhere else. His mind was on cattle and water: All summer they’d had the worst, longest-lasting drought he’d ever seen. Here it was the middle of October, and the streambeds were as dry as they’d been in August. It had been a long day riding the range, and he was hungry.
    Thousand-foot cliffs rose to his left. He swung through the dark canyon, where it was cool and lonely. The setting sun turned the rock pinnacles bloodred, but down here in the shade the summer heat dissipated. The horse ran fast and steady. They clambered up an incline, the trail wriggling across a narrow pass, emerging into the river valley.
    The land was different here. The slow river carved sharp red cliffs, flanked on both sides by huge cottonwood trees and dry pastures. James had six miles to go, but he felt the hot wind in his face and knew he was close to home—the DR Ranch, named for his parents, Dalton and Rosalind.
    Getting close, James felt his breathing change. His horse knew it, too. This was how it was to understand a bit of land, to be just as much a part of it as the red rocks and riverbeds. Newcomers never got that. Like the sheep owners who’d come in when his father was a child, ignoring prior claims of cattlemen, nearly ruining the basin land for cattle grazing. His grandfather had barely held on.
    In Tucker lore, cattle were good and sheep were bad. Instead of a teddy bear or woolly lamb, James’s father had given the twins toy brown cows the day they were born. James had told them bedtime stories about their great-grandpa slaughtering those overgrazing sheep, driving them straight over rimrock precipices. True tales: The Tuckers had defended this land against the sheepherding Rydells. His wife hadn’t liked those stories much.
    Daisy was a New Englander. She had the deep blue sea in her blood, and she didn’t understand the measures people took to keep their land out here. James would take her on the most fantastic rides, showing her red rocks, searching for bones and gems to use in her jewelry. He had given her secret canyons, glowing skies, sagebrush trails, and ancient cave drawings. They’d given each other twins—Jake and Sage—and that had been enough to keep her out west awhile.
    Some people were born home, James thought. They might move to the next valley or even another state, but it was another story to pick up and transplant themselves into a whole new landscape. Daisy had tried. She had found inspiration for her jewelry, and for a while she had seemed to find something larger—different or deeper—with James and his country.
    But when the nightmare came, Daisy didn’t have enough comfort inside her to withstand the loss of Jake, and she had to leave. This was the country that took her son. James couldn’t blame her: New England was her home, just like Wyoming was his. Sometimes he imagined following her and Sage back east to the Connecticut shoreline,