Present day
He holds my handshake a beat too long. His palm is warm and rough and the calluses press against my knuckles in the same pattern they did a year and a half ago when he handed me a whiskey in a motel room and I let myself believe, for one night, that I was allowed to have something good.
I pull my hand back before my face can betray what my skin already remembers.
"Follow me." He turns and walks toward the stable block without small talk, without pleasantries, without the polite filler that most people use to cover the awkward space between strangers. He just moves and expects me to keep up. I keep up. My legs are functioning. That's the best I can offer right now.
He shows me the feed room, the paddock rotation schedule pinned to a board with thumbtacks and pencil marks, the tack wall where bridles hang in size order.
His voice is even, practical — a man listing facts about his land the way you'd read a manual. The ranch is clean and organized and everything about it says someone cares about doing things right rather than doing them fast.
Twice I catch him glancing sideways at my face, and I can see it working behind his eyes — something pulling at a thread he can't quite find the end of.
The second time, he stops walking. "Have we met?"
My chest locks. Every organ behind my ribs goes still at once. I make myself frown — the face of a woman searching her memory, not the face of a woman watching her entire life balance on whether a man in a cowboy hat connects a bar stool to a motel room to a bed he woke up empty in.
"I don't think so." I hold his eyes because looking away would be an answer.
He watches me a moment longer than comfortable — long enough that I can feel my pulse in my wrists, in my throat, in the backs of my knees. Then he nods. Keeps walking. I keep my eyes on the horses after that because the horses can't place me.
He asks about my experience. I tell him about my mother's training methods, the breeds I've handled, the injuries I've treated.
My voice sounds competent, steady, like someone who belongs in a stable. It doesn't sound like a woman whose hands are shaking inside her jacket pockets so hard she has to press her fists against her thighs to keep them still.
"That mare." Wade stops at the far stall and nods toward a bay pacing the back wall — head tossing, ears flat, every muscle coiled.
"Been like that four days. Won't let anyone near the rear hoof. Vet can't get close." He leans against the rail, arms crossed. It's not a test. But it's not not a test either.
"Can I try?"
He steps back. I move to the stall door and stand still. Just stand. Hands at my sides, breathing slow, not reaching.
My mother's voice in my head — hands first, voice second, ego never. The mare watches me from the corner. Her nostrils flare and her weight shifts between her front legs and I can feel her deciding.
A full minute passes. The barn is silent except for the other horses shifting in their stalls. Then she drops her head. Takes one step. Another. Walks to me like she's been waiting for someone who knows how to be still.
I slip inside, run my hand along her flank — slow, steady, letting her feel me before I ask for anything — and lift the hoof.
A stone, wedged deep into the sole near the frog. I work it out with my thumb. The mare blows air against my shoulder when it comes free, and the release in her body is something I feel in my own.
Wade is standing at the gate. He hasn't moved. His arms are still crossed but his face has changed — something open in it now, something I don't want to look at too directly because it reminds me of the way he watched my hands at the bar when I talked about Bellbird. The way he watches things he recognizes.
A woman appears at the stable entrance like she materialized from the woodwork. Sharp posture, clipboard, dark hair pulled so tight the skin at her temples is shining. She looks at me the way you look at a stain on clean fabric — assessment first, irritation second. "Who's this?"
"New hand." Wade straightens up. "Jessie, this is Maeve. She runs the place."
Maeve smiles and it doesn't travel past her mouth. She extends her hand and I shake it and the squeeze is a fraction too firm, held a fraction too long — the handshake of a woman marking territory she hasn't been asked to guard.
"Welcome," she says, and the word arrives empty.
"Thanks." I match the pressure and let go first. Her eyes flick between me and Wade — quick, measuring, the kind of look that calculates distance between two people and decides it's too small.
Wade tells me I start tomorrow, early. I nod, thank him, and walk past the gate on legs that don't feel entirely mine. The gravel path back to the road feels longer than it did coming in.
The air smells like hay and horse and something open and clean and I want to stand here and breathe it until my lungs forget what Troy's apartment smells like.
I pull out my phone and call Troy. He picks up on the second ring. "Well?"
"I got the job."
Silence. The kind I know by heart — not empty, loading. A man selecting ammunition. "What's the owner's name?"
"Wade Prescott."
"He married?"
My stomach tightens. "I don't know."
"You didn't notice?" His voice drops half a register. "Didn't look at his hand? Didn't see a ring?"
"I was looking at the horses, Troy." I close my eyes. The sun is warm on my eyelids and for one second I try to hold onto it — the warmth, the open sky, the sound of a mare breathing easy for the first time in four days.
Then I take a breath and say the thing I know will cost me. "The hours are long. Ranch is forty minutes out. It doesn't make sense to drive back and forth every day. I'll come home weekends."
The silence that follows has a specific temperature — cold, sharp, the kind that cuts before the words arrive.
"So I'm raising our son alone all week while you play cowgirl?"
"It's not like that."
"Then what's it like, Jessie." Not a question. An indictment. His voice is low now, controlled, the register that means whatever comes next in person will be three times worse than this. "Tell me what it's like."
My jaw locks. I press the phone harder against my ear like pressure can change what's coming through it. "It's a job. We need the money. You said so yourself."
He's quiet long enough that I can hear Liam babbling in the background — happy, oblivious little sounds that make my chest ache so hard I press my fist against my sternum.
When Troy speaks again his voice has changed. Softer. The dangerous soft. "I'm coming out there this weekend. Can't have my family scattered like this."
"Okay." The word comes out the way it always does — smooth, flat, the price of breathing.
He hangs up without saying goodbye. I stand on the dirt road holding the phone against my chest, looking back at the ranch.
The sun is low and the stable roof cuts a long shadow across the paddock and somewhere inside that building Wade Prescott is standing where I left him, wondering where he's seen my face before.
Behind me, forty minutes of highway leading back to a man who just told me he's coming to make sure I haven't gone anywhere.
A woman standing in a doorway with one foot on each side. And both floors are shaking.