I'm getting better at walking away from things. Conversations. Rooms. The look on Wade's face when I turned my back yesterday.
I'm in the paddock now, checking the grey gelding's shoes while Wade adjusts the fence wire two posts down, and the silence between us is the productive kind — the kind that means we're both working and neither of us needs to fill the air with something we'll have to clean up later.
Liam is on a blanket in the shade near the stable wall. Lily is with him, building a tower of plastic cups that he knocks over with one deliberate swing and then they both start again. The sound of Lily counting — one, two, three, crash — drifts across the yard like something you'd hear in a life that works.
Then the engine.
I hear it before I see it. A truck on the gravel road. Not the postal service — wrong day. Not the feed delivery — wrong sound. My hands stop on the gelding's hoof. My whole body goes cold from the fingertips inward, fast, like someone opened a valve and drained the warmth out through the soles of my boots.
Troy's truck pulls through the gate.
Clean shirt. Hard smile. Sunglasses pushed up on his head like a man arriving at a barbecue. He climbs out and stands in the yard with his hands on his hips and surveys the ranch — the stable, the house, the paddock, the land — with the slow, proprietary gaze of a man walking into a room he intends to own.
I set the gelding's hoof down. My legs are doing something unreliable. Wade straightens up from the fence wire, pliers still in his hand, and looks at the truck and then at me and I watch him read my face and understand everything it's saying.
Troy crosses the yard. His boots on the gravel are deliberate. Loud. Every step announcing itself. He walks straight to Wade and extends his hand.
"Troy Webber." The smile is wide and practiced and doesn't reach past his teeth. "Jessie's boyfriend."
Wade takes the hand. The handshake lasts too long — Troy's grip crushing, holding, turning it into a contest. Wade matches the pressure without changing his expression. His face gives nothing away. He could be shaking hands with a feed supplier.
"Wade Prescott."
"I know who you are." Troy lets go. Flexes his fingers once — subtle, the gesture of a man who wanted to win the grip and isn't sure he did. He looks around again.
"Nice place. Jessie didn't mention how nice." His eyes come back to Wade and measure the distance between us — two feet, maybe less — and I can see him cataloging it the way he catalogs everything. Evidence. Ammunition. Something to use later in a room with no witnesses.
"Well." Troy turns toward the blanket where Liam is sitting with Lily. "There's my boy."
He walks over and picks Liam up. Not gently — efficiently. The way you pick up a bag you left somewhere. Liam's face scrunches and his hand reaches back toward Lily and the plastic cups and Troy ignores it. He carries Liam to where Wade is standing and holds the boy out. Not to him. Toward him. Like a photograph. Like a prop.
"Good-looking kid, right?" Troy bounces Liam once on his hip. The bounce is too hard and Liam's head wobbles. "Got my jaw."
My fingernails are in my palms. I can feel the half-moons forming.
Wade looks at Liam. Looks at Troy. His eyes move between the two faces and something flickers behind them — not suspicion, not yet, but the quiet work of a man who notices things other people miss. "He's a handsome boy," Wade says. The muscle in his cheek is working. A small movement, rhythmic, the jaw clenching and releasing on a sentence he's not saying.
"Takes after his old man." Troy grins. Presses his mouth against Liam's forehead in a kiss that's aimed at Wade, not the baby. Then he sets Liam down on the blanket — too fast, Liam tips sideways and catches himself on one hand — and turns to me.
"Jess. Walk with me."
Not a question. An instruction. I follow him because not following is worse — not following is a scene in front of Wade, in front of the hands, in front of Lily who's watching from the blanket with Wade's eyes in a six-year-old's face.
We walk behind the stable where the shadow is cool and the yard disappears and it's just us and the wall and the specific quality of air that exists between me and Troy when no one's watching.
His voice drops. Low. Controlled. The register I know the way I know the sound of a door closing too slowly — the one that means the next conversation in the apartment will involve walls.
"You're living in his house."
"There's more space for the baby—"
"With our son. Sleeping down the hall from him."
"Troy, it's practical. The room is bigger, the tack shed wasn't—"
"Don't insult me, Jess." He steps closer. One step. The shadow from the stable roof cuts across his face so his eyes are dark and his mouth is lit and the geometry of it makes him look like two different men stacked on top of each other. "I'm not blind. I see how he looks at you. I see how you look at this place — like it's yours. Like you belong here."
"I work here."
"You live here." Another step. I can smell his cologne — the one he wears when he wants to be noticed, the one that fills the apartment bathroom like a claim. "You live in his house and you eat at his table and my son sleeps in his hallway and you want me to believe that's about a bigger room?"
I don't step back. Stepping back is losing. Troy taught me that — not with words, with three years of advancing on me in kitchens and hallways and doorways until my back found a wall and the conversation was over.
"Whatever this is," he says. His face is close now. I can see the pores on his nose, the tiny scar above his lip from a bar fight he brags about. "It stops. You come home. Or I come get what's mine."
He means Liam. I know he means Liam because his eyes flicked toward the blanket when he said mine and the word didn't sound like a father claiming a child. It sounded like a man claiming a bargaining chip.
He steps back. Adjusts his shirt. Runs a hand through his hair. The transformation takes two seconds — from threat to charming, from shadow to sunlight. He walks back around the stable, crosses the yard, stops at Liam's blanket long enough to ruffle the boy's hair. Then he waves to Wade. A casual wave. The wave of a friend leaving a pleasant visit.
"Good to meet you, Wade. Take care of my girl."
My girl. The words land on the yard like something dropped from a height. Wade's hand tightens on the pliers. Troy doesn't see it. He's already climbing into his truck, already pulling out, already gone — the gate swinging shut behind him, the gravel settling, the dust drifting.
I'm standing behind the stable with my fingernails cutting half-moons into my palms and my pulse in my ears and the taste of his cologne still in my throat.
Lily's voice floats over the stable wall — "one, two, three, crash" — and my son is sitting on a blanket in the sun twenty feet away from me and the man who just called him mine doesn't love him. Doesn't love me. Doesn't love anything except the feeling of a lock engaging.
Wade appears at the corner of the stable. He doesn't come closer. He just stands there with the pliers in his hand and his face carefully, deliberately blank.
"You okay?"
"Fine." The word that keeps the air breathable. It's never been true once.