Black Hills

hotel.”
    “I can stay in a hotel anytime. Too many times. But how often does a city boy get to stay in a refitted bunkhouse on a horse farm?”
    She glanced at him and laughed because he sounded very much like a kid who’d been given an unexpected holiday. “I guess not often.”
    “And it’s given me some insight on why my friend and fellow urbanite traded the concrete canyons for the Black Hills. It’s just like he always described,” Brad added, looking off to the hills, green with the burgeoning spring.
    “So he talked about it, about coming out here as a boy?”
    “About how it looked, felt, smelled. What it was like to work with horses, fish with your father. It was clear that while he lived in New York, he considered this his home.”
    “Odd. I always thought he considered New York home.”
    “My take? New York was something Coop had to conquer. This was where he always felt . . . well, at peace. That sounds a little strong. The way he talked about out here, I thought he was romanticizing, putting the pretty touches on it the way you do when you remember something from childhood. I have to say I thought he was doing the same when he talked about you. I was wrong, in both cases.”
    “That’s a nice compliment, but I imagine everyone romanticizes or demonizes their childhood to some extent. I can’t imagine Coop had that much to say about me. And, wow, that was such obvious fishing,” she added quickly. “Picture me packing up my rod and reel.”
    “He had plenty to say about you, when you were kids—when you weren’t exactly kids anymore. He’d show me articles you’d written.”
    “Well.” Baffled, Lil simply stared. “That must’ve been fascinating for the layman.”
    “Actually, they were. Into the Alaskan wilderness, deep in the Ever-glades, on the plains of Africa, the American West, the mysteries of Nepal. You’ve covered a lot of the world. And your articles on this place helped me with the security design.”
    He walked another moment in silence. “It’s probably a violation of a buddy rule to tell you, but he carries a picture of you in his wallet.”
    “He stayed away. That was his choice.”
    “Can’t argue with that. You never met his father, did you?”
    “No.”
    “He’s a cold son of a bitch. Hard and cold. I had some issues with my father off and on. But under that? I always knew I mattered to him. Just as Coop always knew the only part of him that mattered to his father was the name. Takes a while to build up self-esteem when the person who should love you unconditionally continually chips away at it.”
    Sad and mad, she thought. It would make you sad and mad. “I know it was hard for him. And hard for me, who has the best parents in the history of parents, to fully understand what it’s like to go through it.”
    Still, she thought, damn it.
    “But tell me, is it a guy thing? Separating yourself from people who love and value you, and fighting it out alone, continually butting head to head with those who don’t love and value you?”
    “How do you know you deserve to be loved and valued if you don’t prove yourself?”
    “A guy thing then.”
    “Could be. Then again, I’m standing here talking to a woman who recently spent six months in the Andes, a long way from the home fires. Work, sure,” he said before she could respond. “Work you’re dedicated to. But you don’t travel with a safety net, do you? I imagine you’ve taken a lot of trips, spent a lot of time on your own because you needed to prove you’d earned your spot.”
    “That’s annoyingly true.”
    “After his partner was killed and he was shot, he made an effort to reconcile with his mother.”
    Oh, she thought, then. Of course, then. It was perfectly Cooper Sullivan.
    “It worked out pretty well,” Brad continued. “He tried to mend some fences with his father.”
    “Did he?” she asked. “Yes, of course, he would have.”
    “That didn’t work out. After, he built a very solid business for himself. It was a way to prove, if you ask me, that he didn’t need the money from the trust to make his way.”
    “That would be something his father would say to him, I imagine. I’ve never met him, no, but I imagine him saying, when Coop tried to mend those fences, that he was nothing without the money. The family money. Money that had come from his father. Yes, I can hear him say that. Can imagine Cooper bound and determined to, again, prove him wrong.”
    “He did prove