Epilogue
Cam
“So, how have you been doing, Cam?”
I sighed. It was always the same initial question. I got it, but like, it wouldn’t hurt anyone if they spiced it up from time to time.
No, bad Cam.
It had taken me months to find a therapist who took the sanctuary’s insurance, was okay with only doing online appointments, and wasn’t generally shitty.
“It’s been good. I really think I could graduate already.”
Was I aware I’d been telling her the same for the past two months, and she always found a way to drive it home how not ready I was for graduating? Yeah. Did that stop me? Nope.
Besides, I’d actually had a good week.
Or not. After seven months of needing to ask my now in-laws for an hour out per week because Daddy had made it a rule that I couldn’t use my free day for therapy since that was the day for Little time and other self-care items that wouldn’t potentially leave me feeling bad, I could read Dr Blaire just fine.
She didn’t like me calling her Dr Blaire. She said Blaire was just fine, but she had a PhD, and I wanted her to be proud of it.
I was a good patient.
Anyway. She was leaning back against her chair and had that sideways smile that said she was about to say something smart to negate what I’d been about to say. I liked her, but it wasn’t fair.
“So you told your mother-in-law that you didn’t want pastel de choclo for your birthday?” she asked.
Definitely not fair.
“That’s…!” I huffed. “Daddy told me the hands are baking me a cake we’ll have after his parents leave.”
“Right.” Dr Blaire wrote something in her notebook.
When we first started, she typed things on her laptop, but hearing the keyboards clicking was the most anxiety-inducing thing.
For some reason, good ol’ handwriting didn’t cause that reaction.
“I remember us discussing it was not about the pastel per se, have you changed your mind there?”
Ugh. Of course I hadn’t changed my mind.
“I can’t have my in-laws hating me,” I protested.
And, yeah, I knew her well enough that I knew she was going to point out that saying someone you didn’t like one pie would make them hate you was not very adaptive.
Fuck that.
Maybe I could do with some more therapy.
Double ugh.
“There you are!”
Triple ugh.
You know, when Saúl’s dad told me they had three thousand acres for the entire refuge slash sanctuary, I’d thought sneaking around would be easy as pie.
Well, that didn’t account for one Dwight Last Name Unknown.
It had to be some sort of magical power.
No matter where I was, what I was trying to do, whether or not he was on shift…
Dwight would always find me. Thankfully, paranoia was not something I struggled with, or I would’ve convinced myself that he’d chipped me like one of the animals we were saving.
I’d even told him that—which had been a big achievement, mind you.
Now, you’d think a normal person would have taken that to mean maybe he was a bit too much. What I got for my trouble was him being more on my ass than he’d been before. Now I literally asked around for him when I didn’t see him in one of my rides to check in on the animals.
One of those times, he’d actually been sick, and I’d made what I now considered the mistake of cooking him chili to get better.
The next day, he’d been beside me and talking with everyone who would listen about how I was his savior and also the best cook the sanctuary had ever had.
It was now a whole thing, no matter how many threats Daddy wanted to give the hands for treating me like a private chef with all their requests.
I secretly didn’t hate it, but that wasn’t the point.
“Um. You do know I’m going somewhere, right?”
At this point, it was part of our thing.
I pointed out I was going somewhere, but he dismissed it with a chuckle and went off to say whatever it was that he wanted to share.
Usually, it was just random small talk about his day.
Other times, he wanted to go on random trips down memory lane.
I suspected he felt lonely and maybe wasn’t as close with the other hands as he made it out to be.
When I told Daddy, he didn’t think that was it, though.
Maybe once I’d mastered the stuff with Daddy’s parents, Dwight could be my next mission.
“Well, of course. Saúl kept saying that you’re going riding today.
” As the guy who didn’t have an understanding of what personal boundaries are, the next thing I knew, he had his arm wrapped around my shoulder.
“Any idea what that’s all about? Because he’s been snapping at us more than usual all day. ”
Huh?
I frowned. “Um. I don’t know.”
Had something happened? Not that I was aware of.
And it wouldn’t be anything positive, either, right?
There were no important dates I was forgetting about or anything else, so if Daddy was snappy, something was going on, and oh fuck, I thought we were just going on a ride because he insisted that I kept getting used to Mercury, but what if it was something else?
And why couldn’t Dwight have kept his mouth shut?
Maybe his mood had nothing to do with me. Maybe it just happened that the rest of the hands had been slacking off—Daddy complained a lot about it every time there was a new influx of workers—and it had been justified.
… I was definitely not ready to graduate from therapy.
This was not a fun realization to have.
Dwight better be exaggerating about Daddy’s mood because the last thing I needed was to have him be all grumpy.
Swiftheart didn’t, either. All horses were responsive to their rider’s mood, but I’d never met one as perceptive and terrifyingly attuned to them as Daddy’s mare.
I was so glad we didn’t sell horses, or it would be one hell of a struggle to keep Swiftheart with us.
“Hey, I’m sure you’re good,” Dwight said. “Saúl never snaps at you.”
I scoffed. Of course he didn’t. He never really snapped at Dwight either. He just huffed and puffed more than usual, and we all pretended he was acting very mature and didn’t point out that Dwight wasn’t his annoying little brother. Sometimes they acted more like siblings than Saúl and Sofía.
Speaking of which, Sofía had asked me to check in on Blondie.
She had already checked her over in the morning before she left for a congress she was speaking at.
Sofía didn’t think it was anything too serious, but we had her on antibiotics without a proper diagnosis yet, and I was the last person who had the right to say anything about getting anxious around the well-being of animals.
“You really are the one person out there without a clue of how anxiety works, aren’t you?” There was no cynicism in my voice.
It wasn’t an attack. I was just flabbergasted that he really didn’t, that he meant it when he said he was sure I was good and that would fix everything.
I wish it did, that something was as easy for once.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” he grumbled, “but I mean it. Why would you think he was going to be mad with you? You could tell him to eat horse shit, and he would.”
That was not an image I needed anywhere near my head.
Yuck.
Seriously.
Why did I have to visualize that, of all things?
“Anyway.” I cleared my throat. “Did you just want to gossip about your boss, or…?”
“He hates when you call him my boss. Just so you know.”
I harrumphed. Of course I knew Daddy hated it. It was why I kept doing it, but it was also not the point. I was trying to be friendly, dammit. Everyone said I had to be.
Well, it wasn’t a total hardship. I liked most of the people working at the sanctuary.
They were good with the animals and cared about them, and they didn’t hold any conservative viewpoints because that got them the boot right away.
Daddy ran a tight ship. He didn’t get a say on who his dad hired behind his back, but he sure got a say on who got fired.
“Whatever.”
I should’ve grabbed the truck. Dwight would’ve still stopped me—he had no qualms about running and knocking on my window or simply throwing himself in front of the death machine, and I was supposed to believe he was the functioning adult out of the two of us.
But, usually, when I was driving, he bothered to get to the point faster.
The distance from the main house to the horses’ habitat wasn’t that big, though.
Well, it was, and there was no way I would’ve walked it back when I first joined the sanctuary, but…
Doing it now served as a reminder that I’d been changed by it, that it was now part of my DNA and not just a convenient place to hide.
I liked that Daddy didn’t tease me for taking the truck everywhere when I didn’t, too.
Besides, we had two new horses, and they were still in their spooked by absolutely everything era. Engines didn’t seem to be a particular trigger, but it was a loud noise that set them on alert.
If we weren’t in the middle of nowhere with no actual way to power them, I’d suggest that Daddy look into electric vehicles.
I wouldn’t live it down as it was, though. I’d never thought of myself as a city person, but that didn’t matter much to Daddy—or the rest of the staff, actually.
Huh.
Was it possible they had a point?
Nah.
“One of the newbies lost a bet in front of him,” Dwight said.
There was a chance he’d talked some more while I was in my head.
It happened. It was partly my fault, but partly his, too.
Like Daddy always said I didn’t have a poker face, and everyone could tell when my head was in the clouds.
Surely, that would’ve included Dwight. “She said Saúl didn’t let you ride with them because God forbid his boy gets a bruise. ”
I groaned. That boy didn’t have the connotation that it had had, or that I believed it had had, back when Daddy and I were starting out, and I hadn’t set boundaries with Dwight. So that wasn’t the thing that bothered me.