Chapter 4 #2
“She's got real instincts,” I said, when the silence had stretched enough.
“I know what she's got.” His voice was level. “I also know that a fifteen-year-old with real instincts doesn't need encouragement toward the things she's not supposed to be touching.”
“She photographed the light, Jace. Not the box.”
“She photographed both and you know it.”
I didn't argue, because he wasn't wrong. I handed him the camera, and he looked at the image again, longer this time, his jaw moving back and forth. Whatever was in that box weighed on him.
“I'm not going to use it,” I said. “Anything you don't want used, I don't use. That's not how I work.”
He looked up and studied me the way I’d seen him evaluate a problem. “You said that already.”
“And I'll keep saying it until you believe me.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not softness exactly, but a reduction in the armor around it. He handed the camera back and walked away toward the paddock, and I stood there and watched him go and told myself it didn't affect me.
The rodeo grounds were busy by mid-afternoon.
The Father's Day Family Rodeo was only a week out and Slade's crew had started installing banners, the new ticket booth panels, and some extra bleachers along the east rail.
Jace moved through it like he'd built the whole operation himself, which didn’t seem too far from the truth.
I stayed close but kept my distance—near enough to get the shot, far enough not to crowd his working space.
My wide lens was in place, and I was building a sequence of him mid-coordination: pointing out a stanchion angle to one of Slade's guys, checking the weight rating on a new section of pipe rail, crouching low to look at the gate hinge that hadn’t been working right since the Memorial Day event.
I kept coming back to his hands. They moved with confidence. Every adjustment, every test-pull of a latch, every flat-palmed check of a surface was deliberate. I photographed his hands on the pipe rail, cropped everything else out, and stared at the image longer than I should have.
“You're closer than the yellow line,” he said, without looking up.
“There's no yellow line out here.”
“I drew an imaginary one.”
“I'll respect it when I can see it.” I lowered the camera. “Is the gate hinge going to hold?”
“Long enough.” He straightened. Brushed his hands on his jeans out of habit. “Slade wants a family-focused layout for the weekend. Picnic tables inside the east rail, junior events in the warm-up ring.”
“Is Rory doing the junior events?”
He paused. “I haven't asked her.”
“Have you thought about it?”
He turned to look at me and the late sun slanted across his face at the angle that showed the lines at the corners of his eyes, the ones that came from weather and squinting and probably from years of watching his daughter and not knowing how to close the distance.
“She's fifteen,” he said. “Not twelve. She doesn't want to run barrels in the junior ring.”
“Did you ask?”
“I don't need to ask.”
“Jace.” I kept my voice level. “Are you sure you’re not trying to protect her from being disappointed?”
He was very still for a moment. The kind of still that meant my question had landed somewhere real.
“She used to love the junior events,” he said. “She stopped asking to be entered around the time Dana stopped showing up to watch.”
I didn't say anything. Sometimes the right move was to not fill the silence.
“I figured she'd outgrown it.” He looked back at the gate. “Maybe she just stopped telling me about it.”
“She's not going to tell you if you've already decided.”
He looked at me long enough that the air between us grew thick and heavy.
“I'll ask her,” he said, finally.
It was past eight when we got back. Rory had already eaten and retreated to her room, and the barn was quiet except for the horses settling into their evening routines.
I was uploading cards at the small desk in my loft when I heard Jace below, later than usual, moving without the purposeful rhythm of morning chores.
A charged quietness took over. Next came the sound of something set down on a hard surface. I sat with my hands on the keyboard for a long moment. Then I picked up my camera out of habit and went downstairs.
He was at the workbench near the barn's back wall, away from the stalls. The lockbox was open in front of him. He hadn't turned at the sound of my boots on the stairs.
I stopped in the doorway but could see past him to tell the box was full of papers. Old ones, from the look of the edges. He picked up something bound in worn leather that might have been a journal, or a ledger.
This was one of those moments Edward wanted, but I didn’t raise my camera.
I stood there and watched him hold whatever it was, and I thought about the image it would make. The barn light was low, tension rippled over his shoulders, and the object in his hands carried weight I didn't have the context for. I let the image stay inside my head and nowhere else.
He turned, eventually. Saw me in the doorway. Saw the camera at my side and not at my eye. Something in his face changed.
“What's in it?” I asked.
“Debt records.” He looked back down at the ledger. “My grandfather's. Going back to before the Walker parcel was separated from—” He stopped. Set the ledger down. “It's complicated.”
“You don't have to explain it to me.”
“No.” He closed the box. “I don't.”
He looked at me as he said it, and the space between us seemed to shrink. He took one step toward me. My chest tightened. It had been a long time since I’d experienced a moment like this. If I was reading the signs right, he was about to kiss me.
I took in a breath through my nose and waited while butterflies swarmed through my belly.
Then he stopped. His jaw tightened. He looked at me with a kind of deliberate, controlled withdrawal. “You should go upstairs, Bella.”
His tone wasn’t cold or dismissive. But it held the knowledge that if I stayed where I was, we might cross a line that neither of us was ready for.
I turned and went up the stairs without saying anything, and I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and listened to him below, closing up the barn, doing the things he did at the end of every day, and knew that the shape of this had changed, whether we were ready or not.