Chapter 7
JACE
We were back in the barn by nine fifteen, working the horses down on opposite sides of the aisle, and I was replaying the trail in my head instead of paying attention to the buckle in my hands.
The ride down had been quiet in a way that meant too much. Bella had ridden a length ahead the whole way, her camera bag settled across her hip, her hair loose. The early sun had come through the pines at a low angle and caught the gold in it, and I'd made myself look at the trail instead.
That hadn't helped much either. Cutter knew the path home and didn't need any of my attention, which had left me with too much to spend on the woman in front of me. I had a problem. I liked the way she sat a saddle better than I’d let on at the barn, and I craved more of the way she'd looked at me up there. Like I was a man worth wanting.
I'd had enough sense going up the trail to tell myself it was just physical. She'd been in my personal space for weeks, and I'd managed worse. It had been a long damn time since anyone had looked at me the way she had. I could live with want. I'd managed want before.
What I hadn't prepared for was the part after she'd pulled back.
The way she'd put one hand flat against my chest and left it there long enough for me to feel her own pulse through her palm.
We'd both been breathing too hard, and neither of us had said a word.
She hadn't tried to define what had stopped us.
She'd just rested her hand there, then she'd lowered it, and I'd kept my arm around her like it hadn't been four years since I'd let a woman stand close enough to kiss.
That was the part I couldn't fit into the category of simple.
I unbuckled the cinch and lifted Cutter's saddle off.
Across the aisle, Bella was rubbing Rosalee down with an old blanket I kept on a hook.
She hung the saddle pad over the rail to dry without being shown.
I watched her do it, and something in my chest gave way that I wasn't going to be able to lock back into place anytime soon.
Then my phone buzzed in my back pocket.
Dana: Already on the road. I'll have her back by ten. Saves you the drive.
I read it twice.
Dana had never run early. Not once, in four years. Not for a court date, not for a custody window, not for the one Christmas she'd flown in with the idea of staying the weekend and gone back to her boyfriend two days into it. Early was not a Dana category.
"Is everything okay?" Bella had come around the post. She wasn't close, but she was looking at me the way she looked at things she was trying to understand without the help of a camera.
"She's bringing Rory back at ten."
"As in forty-five minutes from now?"
I nodded.
Bella was quiet for a second. "That doesn't sound like the version of her you described."
"It isn't."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know yet." I pocketed my phone. "But it means something."
She didn't push. She turned back to lift Rosalee’s bridle off the post and walked it into the tack room. I heard her hang it on the peg. Then she came back and stood at the edge of the aisle, waiting for me to look up.
"You don't need me here for this," she said.
"I don't need you anywhere. That's not the same as not wanting you here."
She held my gaze for a beat too long. Then she nodded. "I’m going to get cleaned up. You know where to find me if you need me."
She climbed the stairs. I stood in the barn with the saddle still in my hands and listened to her boots cross the floor above me to the kitchen, and then to the chair by the window, and then nothing.
I had forty-five minutes to figure out what Dana was setting up by being unexpectedly competent.
My daughter came through the door at quarter past ten with a paper bag in each hand and a brightness in her eyes that I’d spent years hoping to see.
“She took me to an art festival last night,” Rory said, dropping the bags on the kitchen table and pulling things out one by one.
A small turquoise bracelet. A set of colored pencils in a tin.
A paperback with a horse on the cover. “And we had dinner at this place with the good bread.
You know the one, Dad, where the menu's all on a chalkboard.
And she paid for everything, and she didn't even check her phone until dessert.”
I sat down at the table. “That's good, Ror.”
“She asked about my photography.” Rory looked up, the bracelet already on her wrist. “Like actually asked. She wanted to see my phone, and she looked at every single one.”
“Good.”
She set the pencils down and looked at me. “You could try not to sound so disappointed.”
“I’m not. I'm glad you had a good time with your mom.” And I was. I just didn’t know what kind of fallout there would be yet. Because with Dana, there was always something.
Rory was quiet for a moment, turning the bracelet on her wrist. “She said she might come to the Father's Day thing. The rodeo.”
There it was. I kept my expression neutral. “Might?”
“She said probably. She said she'd try to make it work with her schedule.” Rory watched me. “Don't do that.”
“Do what?”
“That thing where you get all quiet and moody and I can tell you don't believe her.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You didn't have to.” She picked up the tin of pencils and moved to put it on the counter, her back to me. “She's trying, Dad. That's what you always say I should do. Try.”
I pushed back from the table. “I know she's trying.”
“Then why does your face look like that?”
Because I'd watched her try eleven times in the last four years, and nine of them had ended with me explaining to a thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year-old girl why the person who was supposed to show up hadn't. Because I knew what Dana’s probably sounded like, and it sounded like a beginning, not a commitment.
Because Rory was standing in my kitchen with a bracelet on her wrist and light in her eyes and I already knew the distance between here and the Father's Day bleachers was a long way to fall.
I didn't say any of that. “Just don't rearrange your whole day around it. Help with the junior registration first, and if she makes it, she makes it.”
Rory turned around. The light in her eyes had disappeared. “I wasn't going to rearrange anything.”
“I'm just saying—”
“I know what you're saying.” She picked up the paper bag and folded it tight in her hands. “You're saying don't expect her. You say that every time.”
“Because every time—”
“I know.” Her voice rose an octave. “I know, okay? I'm not stupid. I know she might not come.” She stopped at the hallway. “I just wanted to be happy about it for one day without you reminding me how it will probably go.”
She stomped down the hall, but her door didn't slam, which somehow made it worse. A slammed door was still feeling something. The quiet click was her deciding not to bother.
I sat in the kitchen and listened to the house settle until I couldn’t take the quiet a second longer. Bella was standing at the paddock rail when I got outside, her elbows on the top board and her camera hanging loose around her neck.
She was just standing there listening to the horses move.
I leaned on the fence next to her and didn't say anything for a minute.
“She told me about the bracelet,” Bella said. “On the way in. She was happy.”
“I know.”
“You made her feel bad about it.”
I looked at her. “That's not what I—”
“I know it isn't.” She turned toward me slightly. “But that's what she heard. She still gets to want things from her mother, Jace. Even if those things break her heart. That's not something you can protect her from.”
The air was warmer now, carrying the smell of grass and horses and the cedars at the far end of the property. I breathed through it. “She's going to be devastated when Dana doesn't show.”
“Maybe.” Bella's voice was even. “But she'll be more devastated knowing you never believed it was possible.”
I turned that over in my head a few times, not liking how it felt.
“You make it sound easy,” I said. “Let her hope, watch her get hurt, clean it up after. How many times does that cycle before it damages something permanent?”
“I don't know.” She was quiet for a moment. “But I know that a girl who feels like her own hope needs to be protected from her father is going to stop sharing things with him eventually.”
The fence post was rough under my hands. I was quiet long enough that the horses shifted in the paddock, one of them blowing through its nose.
“You don't have to fix it today,” Bella said.
“And when do I get to fix it?” I heard the edge in my own voice and didn't pull it back. “You're here for what, another week? Maybe two? You get to say the right thing and leave before you find out if it worked.”
She went still beside me. “That's not fair.”
“No.” I looked at the paddock. “It's not.”
“Jace.”
“I'm not trying to pick a fight.”
“You're not trying very hard.”
I exhaled. She was right, and I was tired, and the morning we’d spent up on the trail was sitting right under my rib cage, making me want things I knew better than to wish for. It was easier to put distance between us now than to let it keep building into something that would cost more later.
She straightened and settled her camera against her chest. “I’ve got some editing to do. I’ll see you later.”
I could have stopped her, but I didn’t. Instead, I watched her head back to the barn and climb the stairs. Then I headed out to see Slade at the Iron Spur Ranch with a single page from the Walker debt journal in a sealed envelope and a story I didn't want to be the one telling.
Slade was in the round pen working a young bay with Dallas Miller in the saddle.
Dallas was the team roping heeler Slade brought in to start the rougher colts when nobody else had the patience for them, and the bay was halfway between bucking and figuring it out, which meant Dallas was halfway between cussing and laughing, which was where Dallas usually was.
Tanner Hollister stood by the rail in the way he always stood — straight, arms folded, reading everything without giving anything back.
He'd come for something else, some arrangement with the event stock, but he was here and that was enough.
Dallas walked the bay over to the rail when he saw me, dropped his reins, and tipped his hat back. "Walker."
"Miller."
"You here for the stock paperwork or do you have something more interesting to share?”
"The second one."
"Then I'm staying."
I handed the envelope to Slade. He read it. Then handed it to Tanner without comment. Tanner read it twice. His jaw tightened and he passed it over to Dallas to take a look. Whatever my grandfather had been hiding was out in the open now.
“This is from your grandfather's records.” Slade stared at me, his jaw tight.
“Yeah.”
“How long have you had it?”
“Not long.” I leaned on the post. “There's more. But you needed to see that one first.”
The page was a debt record from the winter of 1943. A payment from a Kincaid to a Hollister, notated in my grandfather's hand as settled through Walker account as agreed. Below it, a second line: both parties aware. Feud for show. Land deal pending.
Tanner set the page on the fence rail. He wasn't a man who got rattled, but something behind his eyes had shifted. “What land deal?”
“I don't know yet.” I picked the page back up and put it in my shirt pocket. “But whatever started between your families, somebody else knew about it. Somebody who wasn't supposed to.”
The four of us stood in the morning heat and didn't say anything useful for a while.
I drove back to the ranch as the day got long, the sun dropping enough to throw the barn into shadow while the loft window above it still held the last of the gold light. Bella's light.
Rory's window in the house was lit too. Two lights. Same property. Same problem in different forms. I stood between them in the yard and started to wonder, maybe for the first time with any real clarity, if the walls I'd built to keep both of them from getting hurt had never been about them at all.