12. Chapter 12
Tana
The first wave of it hits while I’m bent over a colt that has spent the last ten minutes arguing with the wrap like I invented the idea personally.
I lean back on my heels with one hand on the stall door and wait for the heat to move through me. The aisle slides sideways for a second ... not enough to put me down, just enough to make me distrust the ground under me.
"Hold still," I mutter.
The colt flicks his ear at me like I’m the unreasonable one here.
Usually this kind of work settles me. Give me a horse, a problem I can put my hands on, and a job with a right answer, and the rest of the world quiets down.
Today the liniment gets in the back of my nose, sharp enough to turn my stomach, and I have to stop with my mouth closed and breathe through it before I get sick right here.
I tie off the wrap, step out of the stall, and keep moving before anybody can look too closely.
Breeding season has the whole place running hot and hard.
Feed at dawn, turnout, checks, tack, laundry, meds, then the same circuit again until the light drains out of the sky.
I’ve been tired for weeks, but we all are.
Tired is the one condition at Wild Mercy that doesn’t count as special.
So that’s what this is: too much work, too little sleep, and coffee standing in for real food. I tell myself that while I cross to the sink at the end of the aisle and run cold water over my wrists, and while the back of my neck stays damp and my pulse taps too fast.
Nobody notices, or if they do, they have the manners to mind their business ... which is fine with me.
I grab the next halter off the hook and head for the next stall as if enough discipline could still solve a body that has started keeping its own secrets.
By lunch, my body has gone from inconvenient to openly hostile.
I’m carrying a grain scoop across the feed room when the wall calendar catches my eye.
It’s one of those free farm supply giveaways, glossy paper with a picture of a horse nobody here actually owns.
Then I see the square I marked three weeks ago, boxed in blue ink, small and private and suddenly loud enough to hear.
I stop in front of it with the scoop still in my hand.
No.
My cycle’s been off before. Stress or travel can do that, and so can a body with a long memory for bad seasons. I know all the arguments, and I stack them up fast, neat as folded saddle pads.
Then the room gives a slow, dizzying sway.
The scoop slips from my fingers and hits the rubber mat with a dull crack. Grain scatters everywhere.
"Tana?"
I turn too quickly and regret it at once. One of the ladies from the office stands in the doorway, her brow pinched. "You look pale as hell. Sit down."
“I’m fine.”
She makes a huffing noise and steps over the spilled feed. “You kids say that like saying it makes it true.”
“Worth a try.”
"Maybe you need some food … or something sweet." She picks up the scoop and presses it back into my hand. Her eyes stay on my face a beat too long. "And water. Actual water."
I take the scoop because refusing would invite more attention, and let out a tension-reducing laugh. "Geez … bossy."
"Cute," she says. "But please, try to get some water in you when you can."
As she leaves, I crouch to gather the spilled grain, each breath shallow and careful. My period is late. I say the words in my head like they belong to somebody else.
Late, dizzy, and sick for no reason I can defend.
I keep my eyes on the spilled grain and reach for the dustpan before the thought can settle.
I make it through the rest of the shift by simplifying things to small instructions.
If I can just finish the stalls, check the wraps, refill the buckets and keep my face straight, I should be fine.
So I keep moving and let the hours wear me down the old-fashioned way.
By the time I clock out, the ranch road is washed gold with late light and my nerves feel scraped raw.
I sit in my truck with both hands on the wheel and stare past the windshield at the line of cottonwoods by the drive.
I catch myself looking toward the main house before I pull out, like part of me expects to see Rebel coming down the drive and ruin the last of my excuses.
If I go home, I can shower, sleep, wake up, and maybe this will all look smaller in the morning. Maybe my period will start overnight. Maybe I ate something bad. I keep reaching for another maybe, as if one of them will save me.
The pharmacy is twelve minutes in the opposite direction.
I tell myself I’m not going there for a test. I’m going for shampoo, or maybe a frozen dinner …
anything ordinary enough to quiet the hard little pulse climbing in my throat.
Even when I stand under the rude lights of aisle seven, looking at pink-and-white boxes lined up like accusations, I keep negotiating.
One test, I think, only so I can stop spiraling.
Then I revise it: no, two, in case the first one is wrong.
My hand closes around a box before I have finished lying to myself.
At the register, the cashier scans it without interest. Gum. Shampoo. Pregnancy test. I hate her for not caring and hate myself more for being relieved.
I carry it out by the handles like that makes it less obvious what’s inside.
Back in the truck, the plastic bag crackles in the passenger seat all the way home.I leave it sitting there for ten full minutes in the darkened driveway, like not touching it counts as control.
Inside, I go straight to the bathroom, setting the box on the counter with more care than I use for things I actually value. The instructions slide out in a thin paper whisper. I read them once. Then again, slower, like there’s a version of this where attention changes outcome.
When I finally open the wrapper, my hands are steady.
The test sits on the edge of the sink beside my cheap hand soap and the chipped cup that holds mascara I barely remember to wear. I tell myself I’ll wait the full three minutes in the bedroom.
I make it to the doorway before I turn back.
There’s no dramatic reveal … just me in bare feet on cold tile staring down at a result that settles into place with indifferent certainty.
The result is positive.
For a second I only stare, like if I look hard enough the second line will break apart and go back to being nothing. It doesn’t. It sits there dark and sure while my hand tightens on the sink hard enough to make my knuckles ache.
My stomach drops so fast it feels like I missed a step in the dark.
A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it, thin and wrong in the small bathroom. “No,” I whisper, but it comes out like I’m talking to myself, not the test.
I do the math before I can stop myself.
Not potential due dates or nursery colors … or things women are supposed to reach for when they find out they’re carrying a life. I go straight for the practical cost of things, when there’s no room in my accounts for surprises.
I slide down the vanity until I’m sitting on the bathroom floor, knees up, test still on the counter above me. The tile leaches heat through my jeans. My pulse has moved out of panic and into something colder.
A baby.
Rebel’s baby, which is somehow worse once the words take shape.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until sparks flare.
That part isn’t abstract. It comes back with the force of memory: his mouth at my throat, his hand firm at my waist, the rare unguarded look he gave me after, like he hated that honesty had made it into the room before he could throw it out.
Then the rest of it arrives.
He owns the ranch and signs the checks, which means he gets to decide who stays, who gets moved, and who gets left standing out in the cold when things turn complicated.
Men with less money and less charm have already taught me what dependence costs.
It never shows up looking dangerous. It comes dressed as help, as concern, as somebody saying let me take care of it until the thing being handled is you.
I drop my hands and stare at the peeling paint on the baseboard.
Whatever happens next, one thing is already clear … I can’t let this turn me into somebody trapped by gratitude.
Not even for him.
I sleep badly and get to the barn before sunrise, when the dark is still thick enough to feel like cover.
The cold scrapes the back of my throat as I cut across the gravel behind the office.
I keep my head down and my hands busy, grateful for chores that ask more from my arms than from the rest of me.
I am halfway through checking a mare’s water, one glove damp at the fingertips, when his voice comes from behind me.
“You’re here early.”
My whole body goes tight before I can stop it. I turn with the bucket still hanging from one hand.
Rebel is standing at the end of the stall row in a dark coat over clean jeans and those same boots that always look like the dirt knows better than to stick to them.
He has that sharpened, put-together look he wears before daylight, as if the rest of us wake up into the morning and he goes out to meet it already braced.
His gaze catches on the way I brace one hand against the stall door, like I’ve forgotten I’m doing it, and narrows. "What’s wrong?"
"Nothing."
He comes closer anyway. "You look washed out."
"Kind of early to be so judgy, don’t you think?"
He steps a bit closer, then stops close enough that I catch the sweet smell of cedar on him, under the morning chill. "I’m just wondering whether you ate."
“You do know I’m not one of your horses to settle.”
“I know that.” His voice drops, rough at the edges. “But I know when you’re in the barn without even looking for you. I know when you’ve gone quiet because the whole place feels wrong. That’s not normal. Not for me.”
Something in me slips sideways so fast it feels like missing a step in the dark.
For one bare second, neither of us moves. He hears what he just said right after I do, and I watch it happen … the way his mouth tightens, the way he pulls himself back behind that controlled look he wears when he’s trying to undo his own honesty.
“What I mean,” he says, and now his voice is too even, “is that you’ve been pushing too hard. You need to take care of yourself.”
Then he steps back like putting space between us can make the first version disappear.
I set the bucket down carefully because my hand is no longer steady.
My pulse is beating high in my throat, nausea sitting low and ugly under my ribs, and in front of me Rebel is already trying to climb back into the safer version of himself …
the one who says the practical thing and hopes it covers the truth.
I’m pregnant, I think, and he’s already in this farther than he knows.