Chapter Fifteen
~ Jasper ~
I sat on the east porch of the farmhouse with both hands wrapped around a mug of chamomile tea, the steam rising in a thin curl that disappeared before it reached my face.
I’d switched from coffee three weeks ago—the smell alone was enough to turn my stomach now—and had discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I didn’t miss it.
The summer heat pressed against my skin, the kind that built up in the afternoon and broke just before sunset, leaving the air clean and cool enough to draw a breath.
The Black Butte mountain filled the horizon exactly as it had the first time I’d seen it—dark and solid and indifferent to what happened in its shadow. I’d developed a habit of watching it in the late afternoons, though I couldn’t have told you when I’d started doing it or why it mattered.
There was just something about the consistency of it—the same mountain today as yesterday, tomorrow as today—that landed differently than it would have two months ago.
The farmhouse door opened with a familiar creak, but no one came out. I could hear voices from inside—Jojo’s cheerful questioning, the lower rumble that was probably Rawley—the noise of people who’d stopped watching what they said because they’d stopped worrying about whether they belonged.
Decker’s jacket hung on the hook by the door, visible from where I sat—dark denim with a tear at the shoulder that had been mended with careful, invisible stitches.
The marriage certificate was folded once and kept in the inside pocket—not a drawer, not a file, not the glove compartment of the truck, but the inside pocket, where he could reach it without looking, where it was never more than a moment’s thought away.
I’d noticed this two days after the courthouse—had watched Decker transfer the paper from one jacket to another without comment, without making a show of it.
It was exactly the kind of thing he did—a choice so straightforward it almost disguised the power behind it.
Not obligation, just quietly making sure the thing that mattered was exactly where he could reach it.
I counted back in my head, methodically, the way I used to count respirations on the NICU monitors.
Eleven days since I’d checked over my shoulder without meaning to.
Eleven days of walking from the house to the barn without cataloging threats, of sitting with my back to a window without calculating exit routes, of going to sleep without making a plan for the morning.
Eleven days was the longest stretch since before Nebraska. Since before Gerald. Since before I’d understood what it meant when a man with money and connections decided you belonged to him and refused to hear otherwise.
“Jasper?” Jojo’s voice carried through the screen door, bright and matter-of-fact. “You want vegetable prep or herb sorting?”
The same offer he’d made for two weeks now—the same way he left Burke the heavy lifting and Rawley the coffee without comment or elaboration. Not a transaction, not an accommodation, just the acknowledgment that people had different ways of belonging and different ways of showing it.
“Herbs,” I called back, already setting my mug on the porch rail. “Be right in.”
The farmhouse kitchen was exactly what it had been when I’d arrived—wood counters worn smooth at the edges, a cast-iron stove that probably weighed more than I did, mismatched dishes in a glass-front cabinet. But something had changed—not the room itself, but my relationship to it.
The cutting board Jojo used was positioned at my usual spot at the counter—not the place I’d been assigned, but the one I’d picked on the third day without knowing I was choosing.
The jars of dried herbs were arranged with the labels facing out, the knife block angled so the handles pointed right rather than left, the attention to detail that meant Jojo had noticed how I moved through the space and adjusted accordingly.
He was at the sink when I came in, already elbow-deep in vegetable prep, hair falling across his forehead as he worked. He looked up when the screen door clicked, flashed a quick smile, and then went back to his task—a parsnip becoming neat, identical slices under his careful hands.
“Herbs are on the back porch,” he said, not turning. “I thought we’d do that rosemary-thyme thing for the pork. Rawley brought home a whole rack from town.”
I nodded, accepting what he’d offered, and went to the back porch where the herb garden grew in mismatched pots and an old wooden trough.
The plants were Jojo’s domain—he’d planted them the week after I arrived, had explained the properties of each one with the enthusiasm of a man sharing something he loved.
“O’Reilly’s found the starters for me,” he’d said. “His mother grew them for forty years.”
O’Reilly—Macon—had started saying my name from the workshop without looking up, which I’d decoded as the O’Reilly equivalent of a warm welcome. The first time it happened, I’d been so startled I’d dropped the wrench I was holding.
“Jasper,” Macon had said, voice coming from somewhere behind the tool rack, “pass me the Phillips.”
No preamble, no softening, just the matter-of-fact assumption that I would understand what he wanted and where to find it. I’d stood frozen for a beat, then located the screwdriver he was asking for and passed it over the counter with hands that weren’t quite steady.
“Thanks,” he’d said, the single syllable carrying more weight than it should have been able to.
It had happened three more times since—Macon’s voice from some corner of the workshop, my name without context, a request that expected immediate compliance. Each time, I’d answered without hesitation, had found what he needed, had passed it over with hands that had stopped shaking.
I gathered the herbs now with the same carefulness I brought to my nursing work—rosemary and thyme and a small handful of the sage Jojo had told me was particularly good with pork. My hands moved without requiring thought, my body relaxed in a way it hadn’t been two months ago.
Back in the kitchen, Jojo had progressed to the potatoes—peeling and quartering with quick, efficient movements. I took my place at the counter, pulled the cutting board closer, and began sorting the herbs, separating leaves from stems, setting aside the parts that could be dried for later.
“I saw old man Harmon at the feed store,” Jojo said, filling the quiet with the chatter I’d come to expect from him. “He asked about you. Said his daughter’s having her second next month and wants someone to check in a few times a week after she gets home.”
It was the third family Carter had passed my name to—the Callahans with their newborn, the Walsh family with their twins, now old man Harmon’s daughter with her second.
Small nursing calls, the kind too minor for the clinic but significant enough to matter—weights, feeds, the assessment of a parent’s hands and eyes that told you whether they were just tired or genuinely in trouble.
“I’ll call her,” I said, keeping it simple.
Jojo nodded, accepting what I’d offered without pushing for more. “Burke said the Kelly baby’s up two pounds,” he said, moving on to the next thing without hesitation. “That’s good, right?”
“Very,” I said. “At three weeks, two pounds means he’s getting everything he needs.”
Jojo grinned at me over the potato he was quartering. “That’s what I told him,” he said. “He didn’t believe me. Said he needed it from the actual nurse.”
I shook my head, trying not to smile, and kept sorting herbs. “I’m not licensed in Montana.”
“Yet,” Jojo said, the single syllable carrying more weight than it should have been able to.
We worked in companionable silence after that—Jojo’s knife hitting the cutting board in a steady rhythm, my hands separating rosemary from thyme, the simple noise of two people who’d learned each other’s pace without needing to discuss it.
I’d been over to the O’Reilly place three times this week—once with Jojo to drop off extra tomato plants, once with Carter to see the new goat kid, once by myself to return a borrowed book.
Each time, I’d left with the sense of a line being crossed—a path being worn between buildings that had started as separate and were gradually becoming parts of a whole.
I was building something here, the same way I used to build care plans—start with what’s functional, work outward.
The ranch was the place where things worked—where food appeared without being asked for, where silence was comfortable rather than threatening, where help arrived without drama or acknowledgment.
Where the mountain was exactly the same mountain it had been yesterday, and would be tomorrow, and would go on being itself regardless of what happened in its shadow.
I finished with the herbs and began transferring them to a small bowl—leaves in one pile, stems in another, the careful separation of useful parts from waste. Jojo glanced over, nodded once in approval, and then went back to his potatoes, already moving on to whatever came next in the day.
I went back to the porch when the kitchen work was done, picking up my mug from the rail where I’d left it. The tea had gone cold, but I drank it anyway, the bitterness of cooled chamomile hitting the back of my throat.
The mountain hadn’t moved—wouldn’t move—would go on sitting exactly where it was regardless of what happened in its shadow. There was something about that certainty that made it easier to sit with the thing I’d been skirting for weeks.
I let myself think about it the way I went through hard things—methodically, like a chart. The same way I’d handled my first day in the NICU after certification, the same way I’d handled Gerald’s men in the alley behind my apartment building in Omaha.
Start with what you know. Work outward from there.