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many times, he reflected, frowning—when having a big family was a pain in the butt. Like on days like this, the anniversary of his and Meg’s wedding, when everyone thought he needed coddling. Ty doubted very much that he’d get through the day without calls from his brother, Adam, his sister, Faith, and his mother. That’s why he turned off his phone as he pulled into a parking spot at the Pine Hills as the sun began to set over the mountains.
    He sat for a minute, his hands on the steering wheel, gazing out from beneath the brim of his Stetson, but he wasn’t seeing the glorious rose and gold and lavender colors of the sky, or the majesty of the Laramies bathed in shimmering light, or even the shadows of nightfall creeping nearer.
    He saw only Meg, as she’d looked at the morgue the last time he’d seen her. With all the life and the passion drained from her, with only the cold marble facsimile of beauty making a mockery of the joyously vibrant, red-headed woman who’d been the love of his life for as far back as he could remember. Meg, with her cascading red curls and Irish cream complexion, her rich ringing laugh and eyes the color of a wild sea.
    He was thirty years old and he’d loved Meg Campbell since she was seven and he was eight.
    And he’d grieve for her until the day he died. Nothing was going to change that. Nothing was going to make him stop, or ease the pain, or make him embrace a life without her.
    That was just the way it was.
    Ty encountered no one as he climbed the steps to his second-floor furnished apartment. He’d gotten rid of everything after she died—all of their furniture and the stuff they’d received as wedding gifts. What he hadn’t sold or given away, his parents had stored in a basement closet. He knew his mother, the eternal optimist, thought he might want some of it again if he found someone new. Married again.
    There wasn’t a chance in hell he ever would.
    His answering machine was flickering. Two messages.
    He checked caller ID and saw it was his sister, Faith, and his brother, Adam.
    Since the messages would have nothing to do with work, he didn’t bother playing them. For the past two years, Faith and Adam had worried about him on Meg’s birthday, the day of her death, and this, May 2, the date of their anniversary. It would have been their fifth.
    What did they think, he was going to kill himself? They should know better. Maybe if he’d stayed on at homicide in Philly, in the city where he and Meg had grown up down the block from one another, where they’d gone to school together, eaten hamburgers and shakes together, and eventually worked at the same precinct and hung out with all the same cops at Shorty’s Pub, he might have gone crazy enough to think about doing that. He didn’t like to admit it, but it was true. Being in Philly, working on the force, without Meg, had been a living hell.
    That’s why, when his cousin Roy had called him and said that Thunder Creek needed a new sheriff, and suggested a change of scene might be good for him, he’d actually considered and then accepted the idea.
    It hadn’t been difficult getting elected, not with Roy’s endorsement and his own record in law enforcement. And there was the helpful fact that no one had run against him. He had family ties to the community, and as a matter of fact, the Barclays still owned a big parcel of land in Thunder Creek, land on Blue Moon Mesa that had been in the family for generations. When they were kids, Ty and Faith and Adam had spent a lot of summers here visiting the Hewett side of the clan, riding horseback, fishing, hiking in the foothills above Thunder Creek.
    Those had been good years, good times. And coming back had helped. Things had settled down for him a lot since he’d left Philadelphia and started over here. He liked the town and the people, his job was more laid back than being on homicide in Philly, yet it kept him plenty busy. He’d bought himself a couple of horses, he