Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ROSE
Maggie’s twins were trying to eat the remote control.
Shannon had one end, Carlyle had the other, both gumming it like tiny people who’d decided this was the hill they’d die on. Drake intercepted, swapping the remote for a teething ring without breaking stride.
“Nice hands,” Maggie said from the kitchen.
“Lots of practice.” Drake settled back on the couch with a twin on each knee, bouncing them gently. He caught my eye and smiled. Warm, yet careful. The way everyone smiled at me now. Like I was made of something that might shatter if they moved too fast.
I smiled back. It felt like putting on someone else’s face.
Two weeks. I’d been in Maggie’s guest room for two weeks, and every day the room felt a little smaller.
It wasn’t their fault. Maggie and Drake had opened their home without hesitation, “Stay as long as you need, Rose, I mean it,” and they meant it. The guest room was comfortable. The apartment was beautiful. The twins were loud and joyful and smelled like baby shampoo.
That was the problem.
Their life was so full and alive. Drake singing off-key to the babies during bath time.
Maggie leaving her violin case open on the counter because she was always halfway through practicing something.
The two of them trading looks across the kitchen that said entire conversations without a single word, the shorthand of people who’d chosen each other and kept choosing.
I was a ghost in someone else’s love story.
I spent most of my time in the guest room. Not sleeping, sleep and I had parted ways somewhere over Nebraska, but lying in bed with my laptop, doing things that felt productive and weren’t.
My phone stayed off. Had been since the plane. I used the laptop instead, because a laptop didn’t ring, didn’t buzz with voicemails I couldn’t bring myself to listen to, didn’t light up with a name I wasn’t ready to see.
I checked ranch listings in Colorado. Scrolled through properties I could never afford, studying acreage and barn dimensions and water rights like I was shopping instead of torturing myself.
Three bedrooms, mountain views, room for four horses.
I’d get as far as the price and close the tab. Open another one. Close that too.
This was my life now. Mourning the things I’d lost.
Maggie lasted twelve days before she broke.
I knew it was coming. She had the McCrae patience, which was to say, she had about two weeks’ worth before the Scottish directness kicked in.
She found me on the fire escape at six in the morning. I’d been running in Central Park at five, the only hour the city was quiet enough to think, and had come back sweaty and hollow-eyed and not remotely interested in conversation.
Maggie sat down beside me without asking and handed me a coffee. She was still in pajamas, her honey-blonde hair in a messy knot, looking like a woman who’d been up with twins half the night and had still gotten out of bed early to ambush her cousin.
We weren’t cousins. Not technically. She was a McCrae by blood, Patrick’s daughter, born just months before her mother Shannon died from a pulmonary embolism.
I was a Gracen, Theresa’s orphaned niece, taken in after the car crash that stole my parents.
On paper, we were step-cousins at best, connected by a marriage between two widowed people who’d somehow found each other against all odds.
In practice, we were sisters. The kind that mattered more than blood.
Theresa and Patrick had built a household so big and chaotic that nobody bothered with labels.
Sixteen kids, three last names, and a sprawling California house that was always too loud and never had enough bathrooms. Maggie was three years older, which at eight and eleven had felt like a decade.
She’d been the one who braided my hair before school because Theresa was already dealing with fourteen other crises by 7 AM.
She was the one who climbed into my bed during thunderstorms, not because I asked, but because she knew.
She’d been mine since the first night I’d slept in her room at age two, still not old enough to understand that my parents were gone, only understanding that there was a girl with a serious face who’d given me her stuffed rabbit and said, “You can have Mr. Whiskers. I’m too old for him anyway.”
She wasn’t too old. She was five. But she’d seen a scared little girl and made a choice, and that choice had never changed.
Now she was sitting on a fire escape in Manhattan, handing me coffee with the same quiet determination she’d had at five, and I could feel the conversation coming like weather.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“You’re not sleeping. You’re barely eating. You leave the apartment before dawn and come back looking like you’ve been fighting someone.” She sipped her coffee. “Who are you fighting, Rose?”
“Nobody.”
“Yourself, then.” She set her mug down. “You’re allowed to be broken, Rose. You’re not allowed to disappear.”
My jaw tightened. “I’m not disappearing.”
“You don’t talk to Drake. You barely talk to me.
You turned down Fury’s call yesterday. Fury, who would walk into traffic for you.
” Maggie’s voice wasn’t angry. It was worse than angry.
It was afraid. “You’re shutting down. I’ve seen it before.
I did it myself, with my ex, Dale, when things got bad.
You pull everything inward and you go quiet and you convince yourself that if you just stop needing things, the pain will stop. ”
“Maggie—”
“It doesn’t stop.” Her hand found mine. “It just goes somewhere you can’t reach it. And then one day you wake up and you’ve been numb for so long you’ve forgotten what feeling anything was like.”
I stared at the city. Yellow cabs. Steam rising from grates. A woman walking a dog that was bigger than she was. All of it impossibly loud and alive and indifferent to the fact that I was sitting on a fire escape trying not to fall apart.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Start over.” My voice cracked. “I had a ranch, horses and a business and a best friend and a—” I stopped. Swallowed. “And now I have a suitcase and a guest room and I don’t know who I am without any of it.”
Maggie was quiet for a moment. Then she squeezed my hand.
“You’re Rose Gracen,” she said. “You’re the woman who built a ranch from nothing when everyone said you couldn’t.
Who rescued horses nobody else wanted and turned them into therapy animals.
” She paused. “You’re also the woman who fell in love with someone and shoved him out the door because you were too scared to need him. ”
I pulled my hand back. “Fury told you.”
“Fury told me enough.” Maggie’s voice was careful now, choosing her words in a way that told me she knew she was on thin ice. “He didn’t give me details. Just that there was a man at the ranch. That you cared about him. And that it ended badly around the same time everything else fell apart.”
“That’s a generous summary.”
“I’m not asking for the full version, Rose. Not unless you want to give it. But I know what it looks like when someone is grieving more than a ranch and some horses.” She looked at me. “You fell in love with him. And you lost him. And you’re sitting out here punishing yourself.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because she was right, and the thing about Maggie being right was that she never gloated about it. She just sat with the truth and let it breathe, the way Theresa had taught us both to do when hard things needed space.
“I’m not judging you,” she said, softer.
“God knows I spent enough time letting Dale convince me I didn’t deserve better.
But you do deserve better, Rose. You deserve to grieve without disappearing.
You deserve to be angry without shutting down.
And you deserve to figure out what comes next without doing it alone in my guest room at two in the morning. ”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
She didn’t expect one. She just sat with me on the fire escape while the city woke up, holding my hand, being present in the way that people who love you do.
Not fixing, not solving, just staying. The way she’d always stayed, because Maggie McCrae didn’t know how to leave the people she loved, even when they made it hard.
Especially when they made it hard.
Drake appeared in the window behind us, a twin in each arm. He took one look at the situation and mouthed Coffee? at Maggie.
She nodded.
He disappeared.
“He’s good,” I said quietly.
“He is.” Maggie’s voice softened. “It took us a while to get here, though. The grief he was carrying, the guilt about Belle. He almost pushed me away too. Thought he didn’t deserve to be happy again.”
“How’d you fix it?”
“I didn’t fix it. I just refused to leave.” She looked at me. “Some people are worth refusing to leave for. Even when they’re being impossible.”
Drake came back with fresh coffee and a plate of toast and a look on his face that said he’d heard every word and was choosing not to comment. He set everything down on the fire escape railing, kissed the top of Maggie’s head, and retreated back inside.
“Eat something,” Maggie said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask if you were hungry. I said eat something.” She handed me the toast. “And then take a shower. And then come sit in the living room like a human person. The twins miss you. Shannon keeps crawling toward the guest room door and looking confused when you’re not there.”
I took the toast. Bit into it. It tasted like cardboard but I chewed and swallowed because Maggie was watching and Maggie didn’t bluff.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t disappear.” She stood up. “I lost you once when you moved to Colorado and decided you didn’t need anyone. I’m not losing you again.”
She went inside.
I sat on the fire escape and ate the toast and watched the city and thought about all the people who loved me and how bad I was at letting them.
The real grief hit at night.
During the day I could manage. I could sit in the living room and let Shannon crawl into my lap. I could help Drake with dinner while Maggie practiced violin in the other room. I could be a version of myself that functioned, not well, but enough to stop Maggie from worrying.
But at night, in the dark, with the city humming outside the window, I couldn’t pretend anymore.
I wasn’t just mourning the ranch.
I was mourning the version of myself who believed she could build something permanent. Who thought that if she worked hard enough and checked the locks enough times, she could make something that lasted.
That woman was gone. Denise had killed her. Not with a single blow but with a thousand small cuts, payments diverted, insurance lapsed, reputation poisoned, each one invisible until the whole thing collapsed.
And Graham.
God, Graham.
I missed him the way you miss a limb. Not constantly.
Sometimes I’d go an hour not thinking about him, and then it would catch me and the absence would knock the air out of me.
The way Drake said aye on the phone and my whole body went still.
The sound of rain on the window and I was back in the barn, soaked and shivering, telling him about parents I never knew.
I thought about Graham’s hands on mine in Cassiopeia’s stall, pressing his lips to my knuckles, saying When you’re ready. If you’re ever ready. I’ll be there.
I’d pushed him away. Told him he was a distraction. Told him to leave. And he’d done what I asked because he loved me enough to give me what I said I needed, even when what I said I needed was the opposite of what I actually needed.
I’d destroyed the best thing that had ever happened to me because I was too afraid to need it.
At two in the morning on a Tuesday, I did the thing I’d been avoiding.
Again, I was sitting on the fire escape, my spot now, the only place in the apartment where I could be alone without feeling like I was hiding, with my phone in my hands.
I typed his name into the search bar. Fraser Kincaid.
The results filled the screen. Headlines, thumbnails, speculation. Fraser Kincaid’s Secret Ranch Romance. The Woman Who Rejected the Internet’s Favorite Adventurer. Kincaid Channel Goes Dark—What Happened in Colorado?
I scrolled past all of it until I found his channel.
His latest video was at the top. Posted four days ago.
The thumbnail was Graham. Just Graham. No adventure backdrop, no production value. He was sitting in what looked like a stone kitchen, warm light, and he looked exhausted. The title was simple:
Taking a Break.
I stared at the thumbnail for a long time. At the shadows under his eyes. At the way he was looking directly at the camera, not performing, not presenting, just looking. The way he’d looked at me in the barn.
My thumb hovered over the play button.
I couldn’t do it.
I wasn’t ready to hear his voice. Wasn’t ready to see his face move, to watch his mouth form words that might be about me. Wasn’t ready to feel whatever I was going to feel when the distance between us collapsed into a screen.
I locked the phone. Set it face-down on the fire escape grating.
Stared at the city. Millions of people, millions of lives, millions of stories happening in millions of lit windows, and somewhere across an ocean, in a stone kitchen in Scotland, a man I’d loved and lost had sat in front of a camera and told the world he was taking a break.
Because of me.
Because I’d broken him the same way I’d broken myself.
I picked up the phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Left it dark.
Not tonight.