Church of the Graveyard Saints. C. Joseph Greaves

of greetings and apologies, excuses and promises.

      “She look fat to you?” Her father led Lightning, his big Appaloosa gelding, from inside the darkened barn. The two horses bobbed and snuffled, their mingled breath clouding the cold morning air as Waylon, his tail wagging crazily, snaked between and among their dozen legs.

      “Has she been getting any work?”

      “Your grandma Vivian used to chase her in the arena till Jess made her quit. Jess still rides her now and again, but mostly she just eats.”

      Logan stepped into his stirrup and hopped once and swung himself into the saddle.

      You never used to hop, Addie thought.

      “She looks good. Better than good. Thank you for even keeping her.”

      “Hell,” her father said, snugging his hat and pointing his horse toward the sunrise. “Waylon, you stay.”

      The road had been graded, the footing firm and sandy. Running eastward from the horse barn it followed a line of ancient cottonwoods flanking an irrigation ditch whose lyric splash and gurgle joined with the twitter of birdsong to form a bright morning melody. At Red Rock Creek, a mile or so upstream, both roadway and river would fork with one branch climbing steeply through a rocky forest of piñon and juniper while the other curved gently onto the mesa behind the house.

      “Now there’s a woman can sit a horse,” Logan said as Addie’s sorrel eased alongside the Appaloosa, the two animals falling into a familiar rhythm. “I don’t see how you could go five years without riding.”

      “How do you know I haven’t been riding?”

      “In Los Angeles? Riding in cars is more like it. Sitting in trafic all day.”

      “Have you ever been to Los Angeles?”

      “I been to big cities. I don’t care to go back is all I’m saying.”

      The cottonwoods under which they passed formed a colonnade and the air beneath it bore the fallen-leaf fragrance of autumn. Sunlight dappled the road and flared at the gaps in the trees. The trees themselves were already changing—more yellow now than green—and there was something vaguely ecclesial in their procession, horses and riders together, through the golden light and the massive trees and the vertical red-rock cliffs.

      How many times, Addie asked herself, had she ridden this way before? Five hundred? A thousand? It seemed to her that little had changed and yet somehow that everything had. The horse, so familiar beneath her, was no longer her horse; the road no longer her road. She was a visitor now, a guest, and she felt in that single blunt syllable a sadness whose weight seemed to burden the mare, slowing her step and forcing Addie to close her legs and cluck her forward again.

      Mindful humans evolve, she reminded herself, and grow, even if the world around them—and especially the people around them—do not. It was Bradley who’d warned her against what he’d called the false comfort of nostalgia. Change, he said, was life’s only constant—just as inertia was death and entropy—the invisible force that drives molecules careening and joining into new and different combinations: the very essence of life.

      By that measure, Addie Decker was finally living. As a freshman at UCLA she’d visited Disneyland and Universal Studios and she’d splashed in the teeth-chattering surf at Zuma Beach. By the end of her sophomore year she’d learned to speak passable French and to wait tables, offering advice on the optimal pairing of food and wine. By her junior year she’d seen the LA Philharmonic, and been to an actual Hollywood party, and visited world-class museums like the Getty and the Broad. She’d spent her summers working at Le Petit and her spring breaks with her girlfriends in places like Palm Springs and Ensenada.

      In an elective called Cultural Anthropology she’d taken her senior year, Addie had studied traditional rites of passage, from the walkabout rituals of the indigenous Australians to the Jewish bat mitzvah and the Mexican quinceañera. Intended to mark the transition from adolescence to adulthood, all shared the common elements of separation, liminality, and incorporation. College being such a rite, she’d recognized the inherent paradox of studying a phenomenon whose very study was itself the phenomenon, like the mirror’s reflection of itself in a mirror, the images cascading into dizzying infinity.

      Where she’d stood in her own life’s transition had been no less disorienting. Separated, obviously, but when would she know for certain that a threshold had been crossed?

      Then, in her first semester of graduate studies, she’d met Bradley Sommers. Addie had expected some silver-haired eminence, stern and jowly, to head the university’s Center for Climate Change and so was surprised when a boyish man in jeans and running shoes bounded to the head of her classroom. He was, she would later learn, only twelve years her senior and yet he brought to the course curriculum a worldly perspective and the kind of fiery passion Addie had been disappointed to find lacking in most of her other professors.

      There’d been an elemental attraction between teacher and pupil—a planetary pull, as Bradley described it—from the day of that very first meeting. Before long their after-class discussions had spilled into afternoon coffees, and then dinner dates, and then, more dizzying still, into clandestine sleepovers.

      It happened so quickly. Addie’s love life to that point had been largely anticipatory, the campus hookup culture so alien to her sense of propriety. In truth, the boys she’d met at college all seemed either loud and drunk or else so painfully tonguetied as to make even casual conversation a chore. Bradley in contrast was confident and wise, urbane and witty. His interests were varied and his viewpoints mature. Most of all he respected Addie and never spoke down to her opinions or presumed on her affections.

      Not that it had been easy. Inside her body, desire and caution had circled like wrestlers, ducking and feinting, each probing the other’s defenses. That their relationship would violate a central tenet of the university’s Faculty Handbook on Conduct and Ethics was, she supposed, the very thing that made their relationship possible since it was precisely its transgressive nature—the career-ending power Bradley had ceded to her on their first night together—that had enabled Addie to cross what was for her that most daunting of thresholds.

      When, a month into that first graduate semester, Bradley was approached by Naomi Lopez, executive director of the fabled Western Warriors, with a request that he travel to Colorado and lead opposition to Archer-Mason Industries’ planned expansion of carbon dioxide extraction in and around the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument—literally Addie’s backyard—it was she who’d urged him to accept. Bradley had agreed, but only on condition that Addie accompany him as his graduate assistant.

      At first she’d demurred, citing the promise she’d made to herself five years earlier. But there was no use denying that her vow seemed petty once vocalized, and in the discussion that followed Addie confided for the first time to anyone the depth of her schoolgirl yearning for a life beyond honky-tonk weekends and early motherhood and church bake sales—beyond the stultifying orthodoxy she’d feared was her lot in a town like Cortez, Colorado.

      They’d talked until daybreak, she and Bradley, and when they’d finished talking the catharsis Addie experienced had been almost, well, Freudian in its effect. Then came news of her grandmother’s passing, and evasion was no longer an option.

      But still there was the matter of the letter.

      It had been a Saturday evening in June, some two weeks after her high school graduation, and Addie had just returned from the fairgrounds rodeo. Suspecting her father might have been drinking, she’d gone to check on the horses before turning in for the night. A light still burned in his empty barn office where, opening the door to investigate, she saw his tooled leather checkbook open on the desk. She sat in his oak swivel chair, and when she slid the drawer open to replace the checkbook, something inside caught her eye.

      Something gold, and baby blue.

      The heavy envelope lay buried beneath slabs of other paperwork—seed catalogs and invoices and old bills of lading—with only one corner showing. She unearthed it carefully