Make Me Shiver

Have you ever gotten married without telling anyone? I did. Not telling anyone was the easy part. I had moved to a big city, had no friends, and wasn't speaking to my family. I tried the whole "fake it 'til you make it" thing. I was the "fake" part and my husband, Archer, was concerned only with the "making it" part. When I got a call about a family emergency, I walked out on my hot-in-a-suit ambitious husband and my superficial life and ran back home to the family ranch. And I stayed, ignoring my husband's attempts to reach me-and I still didn't tell anyone I was married. Then a year and a half later, I found Archer standing on my property, looking like a titanium rod in a pile of rusty nails. He came to end things but ended up staying to learn who he really married-the shy corporate woman with a perfect blowout or the sarcastic country girl with mud on her boots. The longer he's around, the more I see I wasn't the only one who was disingenuous. The suit is gone, and my city slicker spouse is fixing fence, diving into muddy stock ponds to save calves, and calling in favors to get the cattle enough hay for the winter. Yet none of that changes that my family needs me, and I'm not abandoning them again. It doesn't change the fact that the career Archer worked so hard to build is over a thousand miles away in Texas. Or that the life I want is exactly what he's run from. The only thing we're doing is making it harder to sign the divorce papers.