Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
GRAHAM
The days settled into a rhythm I hadn’t expected.
I worked.
Not the performative kind, just actual work. The kind where you show up before dawn and do whatever Hank tells you and don’t stop until your body makes you.
Monday: fence posts. Tuesday: stall repairs and a water trough that had been leaking since August. Wednesday: hauling hay from the delivery truck to the barn, two hundred bales, until my arms felt like they’d been removed and reattached by someone who didn’t read the instructions.
I didn’t complain. Partly because complaining to Hank was like whinging to a boulder, pointless and slightly humiliating. Partly because the physical exhaustion was the only thing that shut my brain up.
Rose didn’t speak to me.
Not on Monday. Not on Tuesday. Not on Wednesday, when I passed her in the barn aisle and she looked through me like I was made of fucking glass.
But she noticed. I could tell by the small things. A stall door I’d fixed would be open when it had been closed, meaning she’d checked my work. The fence posts I’d replaced got a second coat of sealant I hadn’t applied. She was tracking what I did without acknowledging I existed.
On Thursday morning, I was brushing Brutus in the wrong direction, against the grain, apparently, which was a crime punishable by death in horse circles, and Rose appeared beside me without a sound.
“Other way,” she said.
I looked at her. She was staring at the brush, not at me.
“The hair grows this direction.” She traced a line along Brutus’s shoulder with her finger. “You go with it, not against it. Otherwise you’re just irritating him.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the horse.”
I turned to Brutus. “Sorry, mate.”
Rose’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not anywhere in the same postcode as a smile. But the muscle moved, and I caught it, and my whole day rearranged itself around that quarter-second.
She walked away without another word.
I brushed Brutus the right direction for twenty minutes and felt like I’d won the lottery.
I’d just gotten dressed after a shower when Dex walked in with Jamie trailing behind him.
“NorthFace is gone,” Dex said. No preamble. “Email came in this morning. ‘Reassessing the partnership direction.’”
Jamie dropped into the desk chair and pulled her knees up. She looked like she hadn’t slept well in days. Not the crisis kind of tired, but the purposeless kind. The kind that came from being very good at something and suddenly not being allowed to do it.
“How?” I shook my head. “We gained half a million subscribers from that video last week. Best numbers we’ve had in years. How are sponsors pulling out?”
“Because subscribers don’t pay the bills, Graham.
Content does.” Dex sat on the desk edge.
“Half a million new eyeballs showed up and found a dead channel. No uploads. No engagement. The algorithm doesn’t care how many people subscribed, it cares what you posted today.
And we’ve posted nothing for eight days.
” He held up his phone with a graph that looked like a ski slope.
“Fourteen percent drop in suggested views. Another dark week and we’re invisible. ”
I sat on the bed. “Right.”
“I have a content idea,” Jamie said, testing the room before she committed.
“No staff. No Rose. No ranch drama. Nothing personal.” She turned her phone toward me.
On the screen was a fan-edited compilation, clips from our older videos spliced with screenshots from the viral barn footage.
The caption: Fraser Kincaid is a ranch hand now? ?? Two million views.
“The audience is obsessed with you and horses,” she said. “It’s all over the comments. They’re making fan edits, Graham. Of you. On a horse.”
“That’s... unsettling.”
“That’s an opportunity.” She swiped to another post, a blurry shot of me and Brutus that looked like it came from a drone hovering over the county road.
“Here’s my pitch. Short-form content. You and the horses.
Learning to ride, grooming, mucking stalls, the stuff you’ve actually been doing, except on camera.
You getting outsmarted by a fifteen-hundred-pound animal.
It’s funny, it’s authentic, and it doesn’t involve a single person on Rose’s staff. ”
“Fraser Kincaid: Ranch Hand,” Dex said flatly. “Not exactly the brand pivot we discussed.”
“It’s better than a dead channel.” Jamie met his tone and raised it.
“And it’s the most on-brand thing we could do right now.
The whole channel started because Graham was a regular guy doing extraordinary things.
What’s more extraordinary than a Scottish tech bro learning to wrangle horses in Colorado? ”
“I’m not a tech bro.”
“You are to the internet.”
I looked at Dex.
“It could work,” he admitted.
“Rose would have to approve it.”
“Obviously.” Jamie leaned forward. “Her horses. Her call. But Graham, this is comedy gold and we’re just leaving it on the table.”
She was right. I was already doing all of it. We might as well film it.
“I’ll ask her,” I said.
I found her in the arena, working a gray mare on a lunge line. Long, fluid circles, the horse moving through transitions at the lightest flick of Rose’s wrist. She saw me coming. Didn’t stop. Didn’t acknowledge me. Just kept the mare moving, her focus absolute, her body a wall.
I stood at the rail and waited.
Three full circles before she spoke.
“I told you not to approach me.”
“This is business.”
That got her attention. She kept the mare moving but her eyes shifted to me, sharp and assessing.
“What kind of business?”
“The kind that might actually help you.” I leaned on the rail, keeping my voice even.
Professional. Like I was pitching a client and not the woman I couldn’t stop thinking about.
“My team needs to post content or the channel dies. Jamie has a proposal. Short videos of me working with the horses. No staff. No you. Just me and Brutus and whatever other animals want to make me look stupid on camera.”
Rose’s eyes narrowed. “You want to film on my property. After everything.”
“I want to film horses on your property. There’s a difference.
” I pulled out my phone and showed her the fan video.
“People are already obsessed with the idea of Fraser Kincaid learning to ranch. That interest exists whether we film it or not. But if we control it, we control what people see when they search.”
She glanced at the screen. Her jaw tightened.
“What’s in it for me?”
“Right now, when people Google your ranch, they find a viral video and gossip. Jamie’s content will bury that.
Every video will tag Gracen Ranch. Every comment section becomes people asking how to book here.
You go from ‘scandal ranch’ to ‘that incredible place in Colorado where Fraser Kincaid learned to ride.’”
“You already knew how to ride.”
“The internet doesn’t know that. And Brutus makes me look like a rank beginner on a daily basis.”
She was running the numbers. I could see it. Calculating cost against benefit the way she did with everything.
“If Jamie films,” Rose said slowly. “I approve every frame before it goes up.”
“Done.”
“No footage of staff or staff quarters.”
“Reasonable.”
“And if I see a single comment that crosses a line, threats, harassment, anything that puts my staff or my animals at risk, the whole thing shuts down. Immediately. Non-negotiable.”
“Agreed.”
Rose studied me. Behind her, the mare had stopped walking and was nosing at her shoulder, bored with the humans.
“Fine,” Rose said. “You can film the horses.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. This is a business decision.” She turned back to the mare, flicked the lunge line, and the mare picked up a trot. Conversation over.
I walked back to the main house feeling like I’d just negotiated a ceasefire in a war I was still losing.
The next three days were some of the strangest of my life.
Jamie came alive with a camera in her hands.
She shadowed me through morning chores. Brutus trying to eat my jacket while I cleaned his stall.
Me getting outsmarted by a gate latch that required three hands and an engineering degree.
The moment a barn cat decided my lap was a bed and refused to move while I was supposed to be stacking feed bags.
She had an eye for the absurd and the tender in equal measure.
One clip showed Brutus resting his massive head on my shoulder while I talked to the camera about learning to check hooves.
Another caught me getting drenched when I turned a hose the wrong direction.
A third, the one that would end up with eleven million views, was just me sitting in the pasture at dawn, Brutus lying down beside me like a dog, the mountains going pink behind us.
No narration. Just a man and a horse and a Colorado sunrise.
Rose watched the footage on Jamie’s laptop in the kitchen, arms crossed, face giving nothing away.
When it ended, she was quiet for a moment.
“The lighting in the second segment is better than the first,” she said. “Shoot the stall scenes in the morning when the barn gets eastern light. And tell him to stop looking at the camera like he’s apologizing. It’s a horse, not a confessional.”
Jamie blinked. “So... it’s approved?”
“I said the lighting needed work. I didn’t say it was bad.” Rose stood and headed for the door. “Post it. But next time, fix the lighting.”
Jamie looked at me after Rose left, somewhere between shock and delight.
“She gave me notes,” Jamie whispered. “Actual creative notes.”
“She’s a perfectionist.”
“She’s invested.” Jamie grinned. “That’s better.”
The video went up and the response was exactly what Jamie had predicted. People losing their minds over Brutus, flooding the comments asking about the ranch, wanting to know where this was and how to visit. Engagement spiked. The algorithm woke up.
NorthFace sent a new contract offer before the weekend.