Chapter 10
BELLA
I woke up alone. The lamp was off. The light filtering in through the window told me it wasn’t quite dawn. The apartment felt even more quiet than normal without Jace in the bed next to me.
I lay still for a long minute and listened to the building.
He wasn't downstairs. The barn was the kind of structure where I could hear him moving in it through the floorboards. The horses were settled. No boots, no cinch buckles, no kettle. Just the small sounds of the building waking up around me without him in it.
I'd known he would go. We hadn't talked about it, but we hadn't needed to. Rory had been at her friend’s house and Jace was the kind of father who would be in the house when his daughter came through the door, no exceptions.
He'd left after I’d fallen asleep. That was the version of leaving I could understand.
It was the version he could give without having to negotiate with me about it.
It still felt different in the morning than it had felt the night before.
I sat up and pulled the comforter around my shoulders and looked at the empty side of the bed.
Last night had been the most vulnerable I’d been with anyone in almost a decade. I’d asked for everything. He’d given it. He’d told me he was shaking because it had been four years and because he wanted to memorize how I looked. I’d believed him. I still believed him. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was the empty side of the bed in the grey morning light.
I knew this feeling. I'd had this feeling in a hundred apartments and rentals and motel rooms in a dozen states for fifteen years. The feeling of waking up in a space that had been temporarily mine and realizing that part of the trip was over. The part where I packed up was the next thing.
I had been waking up to this feeling my entire adult life. It was practically a reflex.
The reflex didn’t care that this time was different.
The reflex didn’t give a shit that the man left because he had a fifteen-year-old daughter coming home and a Father's Day to run, not because he didn't want to wake up next to me.
The reflex just identified the pattern: empty room, grey light, used bed.
I got up.
I pulled on jeans and a t-shirt because I couldn't make decisions in a comforter.
I made coffee on the two-burner because I couldn't make decisions without coffee.
I stood at the window with the mug warming my hands and looked out at the paddock and tried to talk myself out of what I already knew I was going to do.
It didn't work.
Half an hour later, I pulled the larger duffel out from under the bed.
The smaller one was already half-packed.
I'd never really unpacked it. I'd lived in this apartment for weeks and the smaller bag had been sitting open on the chair by the window the entire time, ready to go, like the rest of me.
That was the version of myself I was waking up to this morning.
The one who had never actually moved in.
I told myself I wasn't leaving. I was getting ready just in case. The way I always was.
I folded a flannel and set it in the bag.
This was the right call. I'd said what I said to Jace yesterday because it was true.
He couldn't keep drawing me into the center of his family and then building a wall down the middle of it.
Rory had already started to depend on me.
I'd seen it in the way she angled her body toward me when she showed me shots, the way she'd started saving questions for later, assuming there'd be a later with me in it.
I knew what it felt like to be the thing someone left. I wasn't going to do that to a fifteen-year-old who already had one parent who couldn't stay in the frame.
I folded the second flannel before I'd decided whether I actually believed what I was doing.
Flannel. Charger cables. Spare memory cards sorted by size.
I was reaching for my second camera bag when the stairs creaked.
Rory stopped in the doorway. She had her phone in her hand, but she wasn't looking at it. She was looking at the open bag on the bed.
"You're leaving because of me," she said.
"No." I set the bag down. "Come in."
She didn't move.
"Rory. Come in."
She came in, slowly, and stopped at the edge of the rug. She was wearing the lanyard Jace had made her that gave her access to the rodeo grounds. Her jaw was set in that exact way Jace's jaw set when he was working hard not to show something.
"You're packing," she said.
"I am. But not because of you."
"Dad said something."
"Your dad and I have things to figure out between us. That's separate from you."
Her eyes tracked to the open bag, then back to me. I recognized the look. She was running the numbers, trying to find which version of this was the one she could have prevented.
"You taught me how to actually look," she said. "Not like — not just pointing it. Like, what to wait for." A beat. "I was going to show you what I got the other day."
I sat on the edge of the bed. "Show me."
She hesitated one more second. Then she crossed the room and held out the phone.
The shots from the rodeo grounds were better than anything she'd taken before.
She'd found patience — that was the only word for it.
A vendor counting change with her head bowed, the coins mid-fall.
Two boys watching the chute gate from behind a fence post, one of them with his hat pressed flat to the rail. Long shadows on swept dirt.
"The coins," I said. "How long did you wait for that?"
"Like eight minutes." She almost smiled. "I nearly left twice."
"But you didn't."
"But I didn't."
I handed the phone back. "That's the whole thing, Rory. That's it."
She sat on the edge of the desk chair, carefully, like she was testing whether she was allowed. "I gave Dad the album," she said. "He hated it."
"I’m sure he didn't hate it." I doubted Jace would use that term, but his expression often said more than his carefully chosen words did.
"He started talking about zone safety."
"I’m sorry." I kept my voice level. "Sometimes people get something that's exactly right and they don't know where to put it. That doesn't mean it wasn't right."
She looked at her hands. "I wanted him to —" She stopped.
"I know what you wanted."
"He never just says something is good. He just says whether it was safe or not."
I thought about the workbench. The lockbox. Jace standing in that kitchen with his coffee going cold because he was more comfortable managing a situation than existing inside one.
"Can I show you something?" I pulled the album up on my laptop — she'd shared the file earlier in the week and I'd meant to print it for her.
The printer in the corner was Ruby's, left behind with the apartment, small and sturdy and connected to my laptop by a cable I'd found in the drawer.
"I was going to do this before I —" I stopped. "I want to do this with you."
She came and stood beside me.
We worked through it together. She'd captured him fourteen times and every single photograph was a different angle on the same truth — that Jace Walker was a man who expressed care through action, constant and unremarked, because he didn't have language for it any other way.
We chose a better sequence, tightened the cover layout, and I printed it on the good card stock I kept in my gear bag for contact sheets.
When the last page came through the printer, Rory held it with both hands.
The stairs creaked again.
Jace filled the doorway the same way he filled most doorways. His shoulders were too broad and he stood too still. His eyes went straight to my bag on the bed. Something moved across his face and then went still again.
He looked at Rory.
"Can Bella stay for this?" he asked. "Your call."
Rory looked at me. Then back at him. "Yeah."
He came in. He didn't move toward me or toward the bag. He pulled the chair from the desk and sat in it, set his elbows on his knees, and looked at his daughter like he was working out how to start something he should have started months ago.
"I treated your hope like it was the problem," he said.
"Every time you hoped for something and got hurt, I thought — if I could just stop you hoping so hard, I could stop you hurting.
But that's not —" He stopped. His jaw worked.
"That's not how it works. And I knew that. I just didn't know what else to do."
Rory was very still.
"You're strong," he said. "I know you're strong. I've watched you be strong through things I wouldn't have known how to handle at your age. I kept thinking I was protecting you, but I was just… I was asking you to need less. So I'd feel better."
The silence in the room grew heavier.
"The album," he said. "What you built. Those photographs." He shook his head, slow. "I've never seen myself like that. I didn't know how to say that. I said the wrong thing."
Rory looked down at the printed pages in her hands.
"I see you," he said. "I see your talent, and I see what you're doing with it, and I should have said that first."
She crossed the room in three steps, and he caught her before she got there with one arm around her, pulling her in. She didn't cry. She just held on, her face turned away, the album pressed between them.
I looked at the window, trying not to interfere in their moment by pretending I wasn’t there at all.
After a moment, Jace reached behind his back and put something on the desk without letting go of Rory.
It was a camera. Not a phone, not a loaner — a proper mirrorless body, compact and well-made, with a strap already fitted.
Next to it, he placed a laminated card. An approved photography pass for Walker Ranch Rodeo Events, with Rory's name printed on it.
Rory pulled back far enough to look at the desk. She stared at the camera for a long moment.
"That's mine?"
"Yours."
She picked it up with the careful, deliberate hands of someone who understood exactly what she was holding.
"Go test it," he said. "Horses are still out."
She went, already pulling off the lens cap before she hit the stairs.
Jace turned his full attention on me.
The bag on the bed was still open. Neither of us looked at it.
"I made you prove you'd stay," he said, "before I made any room for you to belong here. That's backwards." He held my gaze. "I'm sorry."
I'd come up with plenty of things to say when I packed the bag.
Good, clear, self-preserving things. I'd been composing them in the back of my head since last night, solid and reasonable, the kind of sentences I was better at than most because I'd had to explain my own exits to a lot of people and I'd gotten efficient at it.
None of them came to mind now.
"I built my whole career around leaving," I said. "Before anyone could decide I wasn't worth staying for. I leave first and I call it independence and I've done it my whole adult life."
He didn't say anything.
"I don't want to leave this time." The words sat strange in my mouth, too plain, the way true things sometimes are. "That terrifies me."
"I know."
"You can't just say that."
"I know that too." He crossed the room, not fast, just closing the distance with the same quiet deliberateness he carried with him everywhere.
He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to meet his gaze.
"Stay. Make this your base. Come and go on assignments.
That's your work and I'm not asking you to stop.
But when you come home, come back here." His hand came up and settled at my jaw, his thumb against my cheekbone. "Come back to us."
I breathed out. Could it really be that easy? I waited for panic to set in at the thought of finally putting down roots. Instead of my chest seizing, a sense of peacefulness filled my heart.
"Okay," I said.
He smiled then. Not a big smile. The corner of his mouth did the thing it had been doing since the morning of the trailer gate. I’d come to recognize the small involuntary tell that meant something in him had loosened.
"I'll talk to Rory about it, but I want to move your stuff into my room. You don't have to live above the horses anymore. I don’t ever want to leave you in the middle of the night again. "
"I like living above the horses."
"Then I’ll sleep up here. Either way, you’re with me now, Bella Robbins. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
He kissed me then. Not one of the blistering kisses we’d shared the night before. This one was slow, tender, and grounding. I’d been around the world looking for someplace that felt like home and I’d finally found it.
The three of us headed to the Father’s Day Rodeo together. Dana didn’t make it.
The text came through just before the first junior event, breezy and apologetic and full of promises for another time.
Rory read it once, handed the phone to Jace, and stood very still for a second.
He didn’t tell her not to be disappointed.
He didn’t try to fill the silence. He just put an arm around her shoulders and stayed there until she leaned into him.
Then she wiped under one eye, picked up her new camera, and went to work.
Later that night, after the rodeo ended, I called Edward from the porch.
I told him the Mustang Mountain piece was done.
What I had was what I had, and I wasn't going deeper.
I told him I'd take the next assignment from my own base, on my own terms, or I'd take it from somebody else. He was quiet long enough that I thought he might be thinking about firing me. Then he told me to send him what I had and that we’d talk on Monday.
That was Edward. He'd push until I didn't push back, and then he'd respect the line he hadn't been able to cross.
When I hung up, the evening light had gone soft around the barn. Across the field, Hades lifted his head then stepped back between the trees. The low murmur of Jace’s voice followed by Rory’s laugh came from inside the house.
I stood there for a minute with my phone in my hand and my camera sitting untouched on the table next to me.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to chase the story. I was already in it.