Done and Dusted

“After I spent so much time plotting my escape from Meadowlark, I didn’t know how I would feel coming back. I came back for holidays, birthdays, and some weekends, but this felt more permanent. I thought I would feel trapped, like I did years ago. But I didn’t. I felt blissfully normal.”

Emmy is surprised by Feeling at Home in Meadowlark. Yet this quote also shows how big a shift she is facing in her life as this return is more permanent. Emmy being comfortable with being normal here also contrasts how she felt in Denver when she was extraordinary at her career but unhappy.

“She was laser-focused, and I could tell she was madder than a hornet. There was something in her eyes I hadn’t realized was missing when I’d looked at her before: fire. I started walking toward her, unable to help myself, ready to get burned.”

Luke thinks this when he teases Emmy moments after she steps into his bar. Though Luke had always teased Emmy growing up, he begins to realize that he likes it because he sees it lights a fire in her. This moment is also where Luke starts to recognize that something is wrong with Emmy, highlighting their deep connection despite their initial relationship.

“Watching my niece with her pony made me drunk with pride, but it also sent a baseball bat to my stomach. I hadn’t been able to ride Maple in a month. I would get her tacked up and out to a ring, but when it was time for me to mount, I panicked. Every time.”

This quote shows how deeply Emmy’s accident has impacted her. Though she is passionate about riding, her accident has completely shifted her perspective and killed her confidence. This admission also foreshadows Emmy’s career change at the end of the novel, when she gives up racing to become a riding instructor and share her passion for riding with others.

“Yeah, I was a great rider. A great rider who couldn’t even get on a horse. There had to be a joke in there somewhere, especially considering my last name was literally Ryder.”

This honest statement highlights Emmy’s embarrassment upon arriving in Meadowlark. She knows she has a reputation to uphold and believes she will let others down if she can’t live up to it and her name.

“It was almost like Meadowlark was a low ceiling, and when she left, she could grow past its barrier. So why the hell was she back here?”

Despite their differences, Luke knows Emmy almost as well as she knows herself. Even though he antagonizes her, Luke still sees exactly why Emmy left and sees the problem in her coming back to Meadowlark. This is something Emmy must unlearn as she readjusts to life in Wyoming.

“She went to grab a box out of the back of the truck. It looked heavy. Gus would kill me if he knew how I was looking at his sister, but he would also kill me if I didn’t offer to help. Either way, I was going to end up dead, so I might as well try to get this whole thing with Emmy out of my system.”

Luke summarizes one of the biggest problems in Luke and Emmy’s relationship: Luke’s relationship with the Ryders. Though he wants to ignore it, he can’t help but connect Emmy with all of her family and his friendship with Gus in particular. Yet this also highlights Luke’s more indifferent attitude to the situation before it becomes too serious.

“If there was one thing everyone knew about Emmy, it was that she loved to ride. Not just race, but ride. She was probably the only person who had actually ridden every trail through Rebel Blue—not just the main ones. Multiple times. Knowing she wasn’t able to ride devastated me in a way I wasn’t expecting.”

Luke’s quote emphasizes how solidified Emmy’s reputation as a rider is in Meadowlark. It also shows how, even before he was attracted to her, Luke had noticed little things about Emmy, and they had impressed him. Again, this shows their deep connection, as Luke had known something was wrong when she came back to Meadowlark.

“‘I thought it would get better. I really thought it would get better.’ ‘It will get better, Emmy,’ I said. ‘But the saying “get back on the horse” doesn’t work if it’s giving you panic attacks.’”

This exchange between Emmy and Luke shows how their relationship retains some of its sarcasm even in its most serious situation. Though the manner of their relationship shifts significantly throughout the novel, the tone of it stays the same. Though Luke is somewhat teasing Emmy in this exchange, it is also clear that he wants to help her in Getting Back on the Horse.

“Being alone with Emmy was like taking a quick trip away from reality. It was just the two of us, Luke and Emmy. Not Brooks, the Meadowlark screw-up, and Emmy, the Meadowlark sweetheart. What I felt when I was with her was quickly becoming the best thing I’d ever felt. I’d spent the past few years trying to be something, and there was something about Emmy that made me believe I could get there. Because when she wasn’t being a smart ass, she was thoughtful, kind, and a hell of a listener.”

As their relationship progresses, Luke starts to feel unworthy of Emmy while also wanting to be worthy of her. When he references how the rest of the town views them, he sees how different they are, yet Emmy herself makes him believe he can be a better person. This foreshadows how both characters grow as individuals when they are a couple.

“I didn’t like the way I teased her relentlessly about everything, but I liked the way she fought back. Growing up, people probably would’ve described Emmy as sweet and shy. Not me. She didn’t show me that side of her.”

The more he gets to know her, the more Luke starts to reflect on his past interactions with Emmy. He sees that his first impression was skewed but not entirely wrong. Some of the same things Luke liked about Emmy when they fought as children have stayed with her into adulthood.

“Whenever she burned me like that, I wanted her to do it again. I didn’t know what it was—her honesty, her vitriol, or even just having someone see me for who I thought I really was—that made me so desperate to piss her off. Now, I was getting to know a different side of Emmy, but I could still see parts of the girl with the razor-sharp tongue in the woman with the tempting mouth.”

This quote further shows how Luke’s view of Emmy evolves throughout the novel but also keeps its roots in his first impression. He sees Emmy as a complex person capable of change rather than retaining his stagnant impression of her. This is also one of many quotes in which Luke compares Emmy or her actions to fire or burning.

“‘Anyway. If you’re going to be in Meadowlark, you might as well find some places to love in Meadowlark,’ he said. ‘I know it wasn’t easy for you to come home, and even though you love your family and you love the ranch, those can’t be the only things you love if you’re going to stay here and be happy.’”

Luke tells this to Emmy when he takes her to his secret waterfall. Again showing how deeply he knows her, his suggestion that she will need more than the ranch to feel at home matches Emmy’s own feelings.

“I lost my motivation. I was too overwhelmed, I was done. I withdrew into my own head. My heart wasn’t in it, and I wasn’t riding to my level. If I was, I probably could’ve done something about the fall. Maybe not stop it completely, but I could’ve at least lessened the blow.”

Emmy tells this to Luke once she really starts to open up to him, admitting the one thing she could barely admit to herself. This admission highlights one of the things that is troubling Emmy most about her accident: She thinks it was preventable. Here Emmy finally starts to convince herself of the magnitude of her actions and how she pushed herself too hard while racing.

“‘This is the real world, Brooks, not a fucking romance novel. I don’t need you to rescue me from a creep in a bar. I can handle myself.’ Emmy stared me down. Her eyes were burning—just the way I liked them.”

Emmy tells this to Luke early in their relationship when he punches a man who was attempting to flirt with her in his bar. This moment is one of many instances where Luke compares Emmy to a burning fire. Yet this passage is also ironic as it points to the conventions of romance novels and how Sage both adheres to and subverts the genre’s tropes.

“My dad never talked like this. ‘Why don’t you talk about her more?’ It took him a second to answer. ‘When she’s in my head, I can keep her safe.’ My dad’s eyes were sad. Keep her safe. Hearing him say that broke my heart. My dad was with her when she died. She got bucked off a horse and hit her head on a rock just right. It was a freak accident.”

Though Emmy’s mother died when Emmy was young, Emmy’s life is still greatly impacted by her mother. This moment is also the first time in the novel that Emmy reveals the precise way her mother died, which is very similar to what happened in her accident. It is here that Emmy also starts to recognize the magnitude of her feelings for Luke, seeing how much her father loved her mother.

“Maybe I just needed to leave for a while to realize this place was special, that I was proud to be from here, and because I was from here, I had a different experience from any other person out there. I used to think Meadowlark made me feel small, but in reality, I think I made myself feel that way by always chasing the next thing to mark it off my list. It was hard to feel good enough when you never celebrated what you’d achieved.”

Emmy finally starts to break down her complicated feelings about Meadowlark and how they relate to her complicated feelings about her career. She sees how she always pushed herself to have more rather than celebrating what she did have. Similarly, she left Meadowlark in search of more without realizing all she had at home.

“While I was practicing, it was easy to remember why I loved barrel racing. It was the only rodeo sport where horsemanship wasn’t judged—it was all about the time—but you still had to be a damn good rider to pull off a successful barrel race. I liked that being a good rider was so integral to the sport it didn’t even need to be judged. It was one of the things that drew me to the barrels in the first place.”

This quote emphasizes how Emmy’s feelings about riding became tangled with her career of barrel racing and how she finally begins to separate the two. Though Emmy is passionate about riding, she pushes herself too far when it comes to racing, forgetting the reason she began in the first place. As she practices for the divisional race, Emmy finally knows exactly what she wants to get out of the experience.

“Teddy blinked slowly. I thought she was going to reprimand me for not telling her about everything. I should have. She was my best friend. I should have told her. I should have told everyone. Instead, she said, ‘I’m sorry that you’ve been carrying that by yourself.’”

This quote comes after Emmy tells Teddy about her accident, and it highlights the minor theme of unconditional friendship while also emphasizing Emmy’s fears about losing her friends. Through her response, Teddy gently reminds Emmy that she can rely on others rather than take on her problems on her own.

“My feet still on the ground, he kept ahold of me with one arm and snaked the other one into my hair. I didn’t care that my family and nearly all of Meadowlark was watching. Luke wasn’t my secret. He was just mine.”

Emmy kisses Luke after her race. Just as she untangles her feelings about racing at this part of the novel, Emmy also sees her feelings about Luke clearly. Here, she also cares much less about the opinions of others than she does earlier in the novel, not letting anyone stop her from being with Luke.

“‘Emmy came home broken, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who helped her put herself back together. Thank you,’ he continued, ‘for taking care of my baby girl.’ ‘She can take care of herself,’ I said. ‘I know she can, but you made sure she didn’t have to do it alone.’”

This exchange between Amos and Luke contains a similar sentiment to Teddy’s quote above. Though both men knew Emmy was capable of figuring things out on her own, Amos was glad that she had someone else to help carry her burden.

“It was weird, thinking about how I’d known Emmy for nearly my entire life, but we had just been living our lives semi-adjacent to each other. Now, I couldn’t imagine my life without her. I was so caught up in her. I loved her. Deeply. And I hadn’t even gotten to tell her yet.”

This quote from Luke summarizes the arc of his and Emmy’s relationship and how it has evolved from their first impressions of one another. The word “semi-adjacent,” in particular, emphasizes how the two knew each other somewhat but never took the time to actually get to know one another.

“Luke was so unexpected, especially for a woman who’d spent her life checking off things on her to-do list. Nowhere on there did it say ‘fall in love with Luke Brooks,’ but I did it anyway. It also didn’t say ‘come back to Meadowlark,’ but I did that, too. At first, I didn’t come back to Meadowlark—I just ran away from Denver. Now, I planned on staying. And I planned on staying with Luke.”

This quote emphasizes Emmy’s growth as a dynamic character. By the end of the novel, she knows exactly what she wants as opposed to the beginning when she doesn’t know what to do with her life.

“Emmy coming back to Meadowlark was the best thing that ever happened to me. When she came back home, I never expected to become her friend, let alone fall for her. We’d spent most of our lives in each other’s periphery, but now she was front and center.”

Like the previous quote, this excerpt from Luke shows how he has changed throughout the novel. The use of the word “home” is especially important as Emmy was looking for a home when she came back to Meadowlark, and she found one in Luke.