It wasn’t his suit. It was Troy’s, and if the hand sewn label inside the jacket was any indication, very expensive.

He didn’t have to dress up today. One didn’t need to be in formal wear to interrupt a wedding, but he wanted to be respectful. This was McKenna’s big day. So he’d borrowed his brother’s suit, and paired it with a black dress shirt, but had passed on the tie—he wasn’t a tie guy. He was wearing black boots with the suit because those were the only dress shoes he owned, but he did feel a bit like Johnny Cash, The Man in Black.

Today the black shirt wasn’t a fashion statement.

Today he’d dressed for a funeral. McKenna marrying Lawrence was an end…the death of a dream. But he wasn’t going into the church to fight, or to protest. He just wanted to speak to McKenna, to make sure she’d recognize his rights as TJ’s father. Because he could maybe—just maybe—accept losing McKenna, but he couldn’t wrap his head around losing TJ.

TJ was his boy. His son. His flesh and blood.

He loved that boy, too. Fiercely. Completely.

But that didn’t matter in a court of law. Not when McKenna had sole custody, just as she’d had sole custody from the beginning, and let’s face it, no judge would ever take him from his mother, not when the mother was as good as McKenna, and the father as rotten as Trey Sheenan. Or so said Judge McCorkle when he gave McKenna sole custody all those years ago.

Six minutes after four o’clock.

He hadn’t slept last night. Couldn’t sleep after failing to find McKenna earlier in the evening. And even though Troy and Dillon had warned him off, Trey had gone looking for her. He had to. He had to talk to her—not just about her choosing Lawrence, but about TJ, and what would happen to TJ once she married another man. So after showering and changing at the ranch house yesterday afternoon, he’d grabbed the keys to his truck—which still ran thanks to his brothers taking care of it—and headed back to Marietta to try to find McKenna.

He’d searched for her without success. She and TJ no longer lived in the old apartment complex, the one by the Catholic church. Part of him was glad—it was a crappy neighborhood—but he didn’t know where they’d gone and the few folks he asked either didn’t know or weren’t about to tell him.

But she had to be somewhere. She was getting married the next afternoon, which meant there had to be a rehearsal dinner someplace that night in Marietta. Maybe at Beck’s, or one of the other nice new restaurants that had opened in the last few years, or at the Graff, not that he could see any sign of McKenna or a wedding party there.

It was possible they were doing a BBQ dinner at one of the fancy barns, or even hosting the dinner in Livingston or Bozeman.

Trey had been sure Troy knew, and Dillon, too. But they weren’t talking.

In the end, Trey had gone to bed at midnight and spent most of the night lying on his back staring up at the beamed ceiling of his bedroom, trying to imagine the future without McKenna and TJ, aware that he’d be lucky to see his son a couple days a month.

Trey, who had a cast iron stomach and nerves of steel, had thrown up again in the middle of the night.

If only he’d been able to talk to her.

If only he’d been able to have a chance to plead his case, asking her to consider joint custody, asking her to promise more visitation time…

She needed to know how much TJ meant to him.

He glanced out the window, up at the sky. The sun was dropping, shifting, soon to disappear behind the mountains, leaving Marietta in darkness. He looked from the sky to his watch. Eight minutes after four.

If he didn’t do something soon, it’d be too late.

If he hoped to state his case, it had to be now.

But he dreaded what was to come. He dreaded making her unhappy.