The regression is physical. I can measure it in my body the way a doctor measures vital signs — pulse, pressure, the slow collapse of systems that were functioning a week ago.
My shoulders are back up near my ears. My voice has dropped to the register Troy prefers — quiet, agreeable, the volume of a woman who's learned that taking up less space means absorbing less damage.
My hands have stopped moving when I talk. At the ranch they were always in motion — shaping the air, holding invisible reins, tracing the outline of things I used to love. Here they stay in my lap. Folded. Still. The hands of a woman who's put herself away.
Three days. No call from Wade. No call to Wade. The phone sits on the kitchen counter face-down and every time I pass it my chest does something sharp and compressed, like a fist closing around something fragile.
I press my knuckles against my sternum and keep walking. I've gotten good at keep walking. It's my primary skill set.
Liam is different here. Not sick. Not crying. Just dimmer — the brightness turned down on a screen.
He sits in his high chair and watches the apartment the way he watches everything, those dark steady eyes cataloging the drawn curtains, the TV Troy leaves on at a volume that fills every silence, the specific quality of air in a room where his mother holds herself like a closed fist.
At the ranch he reached for horses over stall doors. Here he reaches for nothing.
Thursday. Troy is at work. Liam is in the crib napping. I'm standing at the kitchen sink washing a mug I've already washed twice because my hands need something to do and the mug is the only thing in this apartment that doesn't fight back.
A knock. Not Troy's knock — Troy doesn't knock in his own apartment. This is Colton's knock. Three sharp raps, the rhythm of a man who doesn't believe in doorbells.
I open the door. He's standing there in his bar shirt, keys in hand, and his eyes move past me into the apartment — the drawn curtains, the TV volume, the sink full of clean dishes I keep rewashing — and then back to my face. He reads it the way he reads everything about me. In two seconds.
"No."
Just the word. Standing in the doorway. His jaw set. His keys gripped so tight the metal is pressing white lines into his palm.
"Colt…"
"No." He walks in. Doesn't wait to be invited. Pulls a chair from the kitchen table — the scrape of it against the linoleum is the loudest sound this apartment has heard since Troy left this morning. He sits. Puts his keys on the table. Looks at me.
"You're making the worst decision you've ever made. And I won't watch it."
I close the front door. Lean against it. My arms cross over my chest — the defensive posture, the one I unlearned at the ranch and have relearned in three days. "You don't know the whole situation."
"I know what you look like right now." He gestures at me — not unkindly, but with the precision of a man who's been watching me disappear for three years and knows exactly which pieces go missing first.
"Your shoulders are up. Your voice is gone. You're washing dishes that are already clean." He leans forward. "Three weeks ago you rode a horse through a thunderstorm. Now you can't make eye contact with your own front door."
My throat tightens. I look at the floor.
"I don't have a choice, Colton."
"You had a job." He counts on his fingers and the gesture reminds me so sharply of Wade in the barn — the weary list, the tools on the workbench — that I have to grip the counter behind me.
"A room. A paycheck. A place where Liam was happy. I heard that kid on the phone two weeks ago — he was babbling, Jess. Babbling. When's the last time he made a sound in this apartment?"
I don't answer because the answer is he hasn't and we both know it.
"Wade told me to leave." The words come out thin. Defensive. The sound of a woman citing evidence for a decision her body knows is wrong.
Colton tilts his head. "Did he tell you to leave?" He pauses. "Or did you decide to go before he could make you stay?"
The silence that follows has teeth. I stare at the dish towel hanging from the oven handle — Troy's dish towel, the one he drapes over his shoulder when he's performing domesticity — and I don't answer because the answer is the second one.
I said maybe I should go and I was begging him to say don't and when he didn't say don't I took it as proof that leaving was the right call.
Because leaving is always the right call. Because every door is an exit and every exit is a solution and I've been solving problems by walking through doors my entire adult life and I'm standing in Troy's kitchen because that's where all the doors lead when you only know how to leave.
"I know someone." Colton's voice changes. Softer. Practical. The voice he uses when he's shifting from the truth that hurts to the truth that helps. "A woman who does family law. She owes me a favor from way back. If Troy threatens custody…"
"He already has."
Colton's hands go flat on the table. "Then you need someone in your corner who speaks the language. Not me. Not the ranch guy. A lawyer."
"I can't afford a lawyer."
"We'll figure it out." He stands. Pushes the chair in. Picks up his keys. "But not from this apartment, Jess." He stops at the door. Turns back. "This place is killing you. It was killing you three years ago and it's killing you faster now because you know what air tastes like when it's clean."
He leaves. The door closes. The apartment fills with the specific silence that Troy's absence creates — not empty, held. The silence of a room that's waiting for its owner to come home and resume the broadcast.
I stand in the kitchen holding Liam's monitor in one hand. His breathing hums through the speaker — soft, steady, the rhythm of a child who sleeps lighter here than he did on the ranch. The gelding.
The thought arrives sideways. The grey gelding in the round pen who wouldn't take the bridle for anyone — not Danny, not Wade, not any hand on the property. He circled and circled and wouldn't come in.
And what I did — what my mother taught me — was stand still. No bridle over my shoulder. No hand extended. Just stillness. Patience. The willingness to be present without reaching until the horse decided I was safe enough to choose.
Maybe leaving isn't the answer. I've been leaving for three years and it keeps depositing me back in the same room with the same man and the same water-stained ceiling.
Maybe standing still is. Maybe the thing I need to do isn't walk through another door but stop walking and let the right thing come to me.
I set the monitor on the counter. Face-up this time. Beside my phone, which I turn over. The screen is dark. No missed calls.
Not yet. But maybe one corner and a lawyer and a woman who rode through a storm is enough to start building something that doesn't require running.