I'm up before dawn because the room above the tack shed smells like saddle oil and hay dust and sleep wasn't coming anyway.
The cot is narrow, the ceiling low, and every time I closed my eyes I saw Wade's face across a stable gate doing the math on where he's seen mine.
The window above the cot is cracked open and the night air coming through it smells like grass and something sweet — wildflower, maybe, or just the specific perfume of land that hasn't been paved over.
So I give up. Pull on my boots in the dark. Walk downstairs into a barn still breathing in its sleep — horses shifting, hay settling, the soft percussion of hooves on straw. The barn light is a single bulb on a chain and it makes everything amber and shadowed and for a moment I just stand there, breathing it in, letting my lungs remember what this feels like.
I start with the feed rounds, learning each horse from the cards on the stall doors — Maeve's handwriting, sharp and precise. Dusty. Biscuit. Reba, whose card says difficult in red pen.
The palomino in stall seven — Goldie, and underneath: bites — pushes her nose into my palm when I offer the apple and takes it without so much as a tooth. I scratch behind her ear and she leans into my hand like we've been doing this for years.
"She bit Danny last Tuesday. Three stitches."
I turn. Maeve is standing in the office doorway, clipboard against her chest, watching me with Goldie's face still pressed into my palm. Her expression is the same flat assessment she wore yesterday — cataloging me the way I catalog horses, looking for what's wrong before she considers what's right.
"She seems fine to me." I keep my hand on Goldie's neck. Steady. The mare doesn't flinch.
Maeve's eyes move from me to the horse and back. She doesn't say anything else. She just turns and walks into the office, and the silence she leaves behind has an opinion I wasn't invited to hear.
Mid-morning. Wade finds me at the round pen with the grey gelding that's been refusing the bridle for weeks. I'm standing in the centre with the bridle over my shoulder, doing nothing.
That's the point. The gelding circles me — tight at first, ears back, suspicious of the stillness. I breathe. I wait.
My mother spent hours teaching me this: the difference between patience and surrender, between standing still because you're calm and standing still because you're afraid. I'm not afraid of this horse. I'm afraid of almost everything else in my life, but not this.
Wade leans on the rail. I can feel him watching but I don't look over because looking would break the circle. The gelding slows. His ears come forward. He turns, walks to me, and drops his head into the bridle like the whole thing was his idea.
"Where'd you learn that?" His voice is low from the rail, and the warmth in it does something to the back of my neck.
"My mother." I adjust the throat latch on one side while he steps into the pen and takes the other.
Our hands work the straps across the gelding's neck and his fingers brush mine — knuckle to knuckle, a quarter-second of skin. Neither of us moves.
The heat travels up my wrist and lodges somewhere under my collarbone like a coal I'm pretending isn't burning. The gelding stands perfectly still between us, breathing slow, oblivious to the fact that two people are frozen on either side of him because their hands touched and the air changed temperature.
"Wade, feed supplier's on the phone." Maeve's voice cuts from the gate — bright, professional, aimed like a blade.
He pulls his hand back. Nods. Walks away without looking at me and I'm grateful because my face is doing something I can't control. Maeve doesn't leave. She stands at the gate and looks at me across the horse's back.
"He asks everyone personal questions. It's just how he is." She tilts her head. "Don't read into it."
"I wasn't."
She smiles. Mouth only. Then she turns and walks away and her boots on the gravel sound like punctuation at the end of a sentence I wasn't allowed to finish.
Late afternoon. The light is going gold across the paddock. Wade is at the fence, one boot on the lower rail, water bottle in his hand, watching the horses settle into evening. I lean against the rail beside him. Not too close. Close enough that the silence has to decide what it wants to be.
"Can I ask you something?" I watch the horses instead of him. "Maeve. She seems very attached to everything here. Like it's hers." I let it sit. "She your wife?"
He lets out a short breath — almost a laugh, not quite. "No. Maeve's a friend. Known her since we were kids."
The water bottle turns in his hand, plastic crinkling. He's quiet long enough that I can hear the horses pulling grass on the other side of the fence.
"My wife left five years ago." He says it to the paddock, not to me. "Couldn't do the land anymore. Wanted a city, wanted noise, wanted—" He stops. Shrugs with one shoulder. "Wanted something I couldn't build out here. Took our daughter with her."
The thought arrives instantly and breaks everything inside me. He wasn't married then. Things could have been different.
Something shifts in his jaw. He looks out at the herd and I can see him deciding how much to give me.
"She's six now. Lily. She's with her mom this week." His thumb dents the water bottle. "I built this place for a family. Turns out the family didn't want what I built."
His voice doesn't break. But it bends — the way a fence post bends in a storm, still standing but leaning into the weight.
"I'm sorry, Wade." The words come out quiet and the wind takes them and I wish I had something bigger to offer — something that weighs as much as what he just set down in front of me.
He glances at me. Holds the look for a breath. "It is what it is." He crushes the bottle in his fist — slow, deliberate, the plastic collapsing inward.
"You've got good hands, Jessie. That gelding hasn't let anyone bridle him in three weeks." He says it without looking at me, then pushes off the fence and walks toward the barn.
I watch him go and the ground tilts under my feet because the math is already running and I can't stop it.
He wasn't married. The woman on the phone wasn't his wife. Somebody lied.
I sit on the cot in my room and the math destroys me one number at a time. He was divorced when I met him. The photo on the nightstand was a memory, not a present tense.
The woman who answered the phone — whoever she was — said four words and because of those four words I crumpled a napkin in a café and picked up Troy's keys and walked back into the apartment I was supposed to be leaving.
Because of that lie I told Troy the baby was his. Because of that lie my son has Troy's last name and a father who holds him like a prop — not like a child, like evidence. Proof that she stayed.
Liam could have had this ranch. This sky. This man who built a home for a family and got left with empty rooms. A boy with Wade's dark hair and his steady way of watching could have grown up on this land, learned to ride in that paddock, fallen asleep to the sound of horses instead of a man's voice getting louder behind a closed door.
My hands are shaking in my lap. My vision blurs and I press the heels of my palms into my eyes hard enough to see white.
Everything could have been different. And I can't undo a single piece of it.