Chapter 18
Cash
Rowan Walsh drove like a man who’d been called to emergencies his whole life. He was fast but controlled, one hand loose on the wheel, the other braced against the door as he took the county road turns without slowing down enough to make me comfortable.
I held onto the oh-shit handle above the passenger window and didn’t say a word about it.
The Macready place was about fifteen miles outside of town, a modest cattle operation that had seen better decades.
I recognized the land as we pulled in through the gate, the rolling pasture broken up by clusters of live oak and a rusted windmill that creaked in the afternoon breeze.
I’d ridden this fence line once as a kid, back when old Roy Macready was still alive and running the place himself. That felt like another lifetime.
Rowan had his bag out of the truck bed before the engine had fully quit ticking.
“She’s in the far pen,” called a woman from the porch. Mid-fifties, work-worn, wiping her hands on a rag. She looked at me with the particular suspicion reserved for strangers on private land. “Who’s this?”
“Cash Callahan,” Rowan said, already moving. “He’s my assistant.”
I fell into step beside him, not entirely sure when I’d agreed to be his assistant exactly, but the word had left his mouth with such easy certainty that arguing with it felt pointless.
The heifer was in the corner of a small pen off the main barn, and the moment I laid eyes on her, I knew it was bad.
She was a young one, probably first calf, her sides heaving with the kind of exhausted effort that had long since stopped producing results.
Her tail was up, her back legs trembling, and she had the glassy, distant look of an animal that had been fighting something for too long.
“How long?” Rowan asked the woman, who’d followed us out.
“Since before sunup,” she said, arms crossed. “I gave her as long as I could before I called.”
Rowan set his bag down on the top rail of the fence and stripped off his jacket without ceremony, handing it to me.
I took it without thinking. He rolled his sleeve up past his elbow, snapped on a long glove, and climbed into the pen with the quiet, unhurried confidence of a seasoned veterinarian who’d done this a hundred times.
He knew that urgency and panic were two different things entirely and was able to keep them separate.
I leaned against the fence rail and watched him work.
He moved around the heifer slowly, talking to her in a low, even voice, his free hand resting on her flank.
She shifted, uneasy, but didn’t bolt. He had a way about him that settled animals, some quality in the stillness of his hands or the steadiness of his voice that communicated something beyond words.
I recognized it because I’d seen it in good horsemen, the ones who didn’t need to dominate an animal to control it.
I hadn’t expected to find that quality in Rowan of all people.
He crouched behind her, made a quick assessment, and glanced back at me over his shoulder. His dark green eyes were calm, clinical, but there was something else in them too. Something almost like amusement.
“You going to stand there collecting dust,” he said, “or are you going to come hold her head?”
I pushed off the fence rail and climbed into the pen.
The heifer was bigger up close, her sides slick with sweat, her breath coming in short, labored bursts. I positioned myself at her head, getting both hands on her halter and planting my feet the way you do when you expect a fight.
“Talk to her,” Rowan said from behind, his voice low. “Doesn’t matter what you say. Just keep her calm.”
I looked down at the heifer’s wide, rolling eye and felt something in my chest loosen unexpectedly.
“Easy,” I said, my voice dropping into the same slow Texas drawl I used with horses back when I still had horses worth talking to. I hadn’t had to use that voice in years. “Easy, girl. Nobody’s tryin’ to hurt you. You’re doin’ fine.”
She shuddered but stayed put.
From behind me came the sounds of Rowan working, quiet and methodical.
I didn’t look back. I kept my eyes on the heifer and kept talking, low and steady, stringing together whatever words came to mind.
The afternoon sun was cutting sideways across the pen, warm on the back of my neck, and somewhere in the distance a meadowlark sang like nothing was amiss.
“Calf’s malpresented,” Rowan said. “One leg’s folded back. I need to reposition it before she can push.”
“Can you do it?”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
The heifer surged forward with a grunt of pain, driving her weight against my hands. I dug my heels into the dirt and held on, leaning into her, keeping her from spinning or going down.
“Hold her,” Rowan said, his voice tight now with effort.
“I’m holdin’ her as best I can,” I said through gritted teeth.
It took a few minutes that felt longer than they were. The heifer trembled and groaned, and I kept my grip and kept talking, and Rowan worked with a focused, quiet intensity that I found myself watching in the corner of my eye.
He was good at this. Better than I expected. There was a precision to the way he moved, an economy of motion that came from genuine skill rather than performance. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He was just doing the work.
It almost made me think he wasn’t such a fucking idiot. And I began to understand what Brooks saw in him.
“There,” Rowan said. “Okay. She’s going to push now. Let her.”
I loosened my grip but kept my hands on the halter, and the heifer did exactly what Rowan said. She was clearly exhausted, but pushed nonetheless. And then the calf plopped onto the straw, the heifer delivering it like it was nothing.
“Good girl,” I found myself cooing, letting the heifer go.
Rowan cleared the calf’s mouth and stepped away, letting the cow get down to business licking the calf clean. He stripped off his glove and walked over to me, the pair of us leaning against the fence.
“You make a decent assistant,” he grinned, giving me a nudge. “Brooks said you knew how to handle animals.”
“You gotta when you grow up on a ranch,” I replied, marveling at this small miracle of life that I’d nearly forgotten about completely.
“I bet you’d make a good rancher,” Rowan said. Then he turned before I could reply, looking back at the woman standing nervously behind the fence. “She’s gonna be alright. Calf looks healthy. It’s a heifer.”
“Oh thank God,” the woman sighed in relief. “I thought we were gonna lose her.”
“Not today, you’re not,” Rowan smiled.
He hopped the fence and headed with the woman back toward his truck. Probably to talk about aftercare or billing or something. But I stood there a moment longer, just watching as the calf experienced its first few moments in a much bigger world.
“A good rancher…” I mumbled, repeating Rowan’s words.
The words sat in my mouth like something I couldn’t quite swallow.
Could I be a good rancher?
I hadn’t thought of myself that way in years.
Hadn’t thought of myself as anything connected to this land or this life since I was sixteen years old and my father’s voice rang in my ears as I left home for what I thought was the last time.
I’d spent the better part of two decades constructing a version of myself that had nothing to do with cattle or calving or the particular smell of a barn at dusk.
And yet here I was, standing in a stranger’s pen with manure on my boots and straw on my jeans, feeling something that I couldn’t quite name and didn’t entirely hate.
The calf had found its legs already, wobbly and knock-kneed, bumping its head against its mother’s flank with the clumsy insistence of a newborn looking for milk.
The cow licked it with that single-minded tenderness that animals sometimes showed and people, in my experience, didn’t. Everyone except for Mike that was…
I watched longer than I meant to.
By the time I climbed back over the fence and made my way toward Rowan’s truck, he was finishing up with the woman, both of them standing near the tailgate while she wrote something on a check.
She looked less tense now, her arms uncrossed, her whole posture different from what it had been an hour ago.
Rowan had done that. Walked onto her property, done the work, and left the place better than he’d found it.
I leaned against the side of the truck and waited.
“You need anything else, you call me,” Rowan was saying, tucking the check into his shirt pocket. “She’ll be tired for a few days. Make sure she’s drinking and let the calf nurse as much as it wants.”
The woman nodded, then glanced over at me. The suspicion was mostly gone now, replaced by something more neutral. “You’re James Callahan’s boy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because there wasn’t much else to say to that.
She studied me for a moment with the particular appraisal of someone who’d known my father and was trying to find him in my face. I’d gotten used to that look since arriving in Sagebrush. I still didn’t like it.
“He talked about you,” she said finally. “Near the end.”
I didn’t respond to that. Couldn’t. I just nodded once and looked away, back toward the pen where the calf was still finding its feet.
Rowan had the good sense not to say anything as we climbed into the truck. He started the engine, turned around in the drive, and pulled back through the gate onto the county road. The afternoon light was going golden now, stretching long shadows across the pasture grass.
We drove in silence for a few minutes. Not the uncomfortable kind. Just quiet.
“Cash,” Rowan said unprompted. “Brooks told me everything that happened to you in this town and you have every right to hate it.”
I didn’t reply.
“And I know you don’t really like me, but I just want you to know that Sagebrush has changed.” He glanced over at me. “You have family here if you want it.”
I furrowed my brows, ready to tear into him for being so fucking annoying and in my business to boot. But he just held up a hand to silence me.
“I know you’re hurt and I know this isn’t where you want to be. But Brooks really does care about you and so do I.” He gave me a small smile. “And if you needed a job to start, I could always use some help at the clinic.”
The anger faded before I could rekindle it. Instead, I settled for irritation. “Are you always this irritatingly nice?” I barked.
“What’s wrong with being nice?”
“Pushovers are nice. I’m not a pushover.”
“Neither am I,” he laughed. “I just don’t like to fight as much as you do.”
“I’m not fightin’.”
“Yes you are, Cash,” he grinned, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re fighting me, Brooks, Sagebrush, your own grief, and you’re fighting that pastor.”
Lightning shot through my body. “W-What the hell is that supposed to mean?!” I cried. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about.”
“Oh, I think you do, Cash. It’s easy to see if you’re paying attention.” He glanced my way, giving me a knowing look. “And if you could see the way Mike looks at you when you’re walking away, you’d know a lot more.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, so furious I couldn’t speak.
And the truth was, I didn’t know what to say.
How could I defend myself against the truth?
Up until that moment, I thought it was a secret.
But, somehow, people had noticed. Now it seemed all of Sagebrush was talking about me again, but for a different reason this time.
“You and Brooks need to learn to mind your own damn business,” I growled at last. “I’m tired of gettin’ a talkin’ to every time I’m near one of you.”
“Then maybe listen for once,” Rowan replied, not masking his irritated tone.
“And stop being such a stubborn asshole to everyone. You’ve got a ranch here, family, and a chance at something that most would kill for.
And you’re going to just sell it without a second though?
” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s time you started working through some of that misplaced anger.
Hate your father all you want, he deserves it.
But don’t take it out on everyone else.” He looked at me one last time. “And stop taking it out on yourself.”