Wade hasn't mentioned last night. Not a word, not a glance, not even the kind of silence that acknowledges something happened.
He gave my tasks to Maeve at dawn — Maeve, who delivered them with her clipboard and her mouth-only smile like she'd been promoted to translator between two people who used to speak the same language.
He hasn't looked at me directly since the barn. The air between us is careful and loaded, like a fence wire pulled one turn past tight, vibrating with everything it's trying to hold.
So I work. Work is the only language I trust — the one that doesn't ask questions, doesn't need context, doesn't care what I did in a motel room a year and a half ago or who I lied to afterward.
I muck stalls and check water lines and carry feed buckets until my shoulders burn, and every time I pass the barn entrance I feel him not looking at me the way you feel a draft from a door someone left open on purpose.
Mid-morning I notice Reba in stall four favouring her left front again — shifting weight with every step, head bobbing on the down stride. I check the hoof and find the horseshoe sitting wrong, tilted inward, pressing on the soft part of the sole near the frog.
Same problem, different shoe. I lead her outside and tie her to the post, lift the hoof between my knees, and start working the shoe loose. My hands are steady. My voice is low — the voice my mother taught me, the one that tells a horse you're not in a hurry and neither is anyone else.
Reba's ears are forward. Her weight settles. I'm halfway through when a shape comes around the corner from the front — fast, unannounced, sharp heels on hard ground. Maeve.
She doesn't slow down, doesn't call out, just appears in the mare's peripheral vision like a door slamming open in a quiet room.
Reba sees her too late. The mare startles — head up, eyes white, every muscle firing at once. She rears against the post and the rope snaps taut and the back legs kick out and the hoof catches me square in the stomach.
The world empties. I'm on my back in the dirt and the sky is white above me and there is no air in my body. None.
My diaphragm is locked, my lungs are sealed, and my mouth is open but nothing is going in or coming out. The dust settles around me like it's got all the time in the world.
Maeve's voice, somewhere above. "She should have tied her shorter." I can't see her face.
I can't see anything except white sky and the black edge of panic creeping in from the corners because I can't breathe and my stomach is screaming and the place where the hoof landed is the exact place where a surgeon cut me open fourteen months ago to pull my son out of my body.
Boots on dirt. Fast. Wade drops beside me, knees hitting the ground, hands already on my ribs. "Where does it hurt? Jessie. Look at me. Where?"
I can't answer. My mouth is working but my lungs won't cooperate. He presses along my ribs — left side, right side, careful, methodical, checking for the give that means something's broken.
"I need to check your stomach," he says, and his voice is steady the way steady costs something. He lifts the hem of my shirt.
His hands stop.
I see it happen on his face — the pause, the shift, the moment his eyes land on the scar and every other thought in his head goes quiet. It sits low across my abdomen, thin and clean, a pale horizontal line that hasn't had time to fade. Not years old. Not a decade of silver. Months. Fresh enough that the skin around it is still slightly raised, still pink at the edges.
He knows what it is. I can see that he knows because his jaw tightens in a way that has nothing to do with my ribs. His ex-wife had the same scar — I know this because he told me she took their daughter, which means he was there when Lily was born, which means he's seen this exact line before.
On another woman's body. After another child. He knows a caesarean scar the way a rancher knows a brand — you don't forget the shape once you've watched it heal.
His fingers finish checking my abdomen. Pressing gently below the scar, above it, along the sides. Professional. Thorough.
But his jaw is doing something his hands aren't — clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing, like he's chewing through a thought he can't swallow.
"Nothing's broken." He helps me sit up. His hand is on my back, warm through my shirt, and I want to lean into it and I want to run from it in equal measure.
My breath is coming back in shallow, ragged pulls. The dust is in my throat and my eyes are watering and the place where the hoof hit is throbbing in time with my heartbeat.
Maeve has disappeared. Of course she has. She appeared from nowhere, startled a horse, and vanished — a woman who leaves damage the way weather leaves debris, without staying to survey it.
Wade walks me to the bench outside the tack room. We sit. He hands me water and I drink it with shaking hands, spilling some down my chin, too winded to care.
He's quiet for a long time. The kind of quiet that's doing math. The kind that's lining up dates on a calendar and watching them fall into a pattern that changes everything.
"That scar's recent." He says it to the paddock, not to me. His elbows are on his knees and his hands are hanging between them and he's looking straight ahead.
My throat tightens. I don't answer.
"Caesarean." Still not looking at me. "That's what that is." Not a question.
"Yes." He’s looking at me like he’s calculating something. Like he’s calculating whether math is right.
"You have a child. After we spent a night together. Can it be mine?"
The ground tilts. I grip the edge of the bench and the wood bites into my palms.
"I have a boyfriend. We have a son together." Each word costs something. Each word is a brick in a wall I'm building between us while the mortar's still wet. "He's fourteen months."
I watch him do the math and not completely believe me. A year and a half since Brannigan's. Fourteen months old. Nine months of pregnancy between the two numbers.
His face doesn't change — nothing visible, nothing I could point to and say there, that's the moment he understood.
But something behind his eyes shifts, like a door closing from the inside. Whatever he's thinking — whatever calculation just finished running behind that steady, patient face — he locks it away where I can't reach it.
He nods. Once. Slow. Then he stands, and for a second he looks down at me and his mouth opens like there's a sentence waiting behind it.
But it doesn't come. He closes his mouth. Turns. Walks toward the stable with his shoulders set and his hands in his pockets and his boots hitting the dirt in a rhythm that sounds like a man counting to ten so he doesn't say something he can't take back.
I sit on the bench with my hands pressed flat against my stomach. Over the scar. Over the place where they cut me open to pull Liam into the world. Over everything I'm hiding from the man who just walked away doing arithmetic he'll never say out loud.
The sun is warm on my face and the horses are quiet in their stalls and somewhere inside that barn Wade Prescott is standing alone with a number that doesn't add up and a question he didn't ask.
And I'm sitting here knowing the answer would destroy us both.