Chapter 52 #2
Mr. Calloway flinched. Actually flinched.
"You're a miserable piece of shit," Rhett said, quiet and steady and final. "And I'm done makin' excuses for you."
He turned to me. The anger was still there, but underneath it—directed at me now—was something rawer. Guilt, maybe. Or shame that this had happened on his land, under his watch, by his father's hand.
"Calvin, I'm sorry." His voice cracked on the second word, just barely, and he cleared his throat like it hadn't happened. "If I'd known—"
"But you didn't." I met his eyes and held them.
Rhett nodded once. Looked at the ground. Looked back up. Then he turned and walked toward the barn without another word, his shoulders set in that rigid line that meant he was holding himself together by force of will and not much else.
Mr. Calloway, coward that he was, scurried back to the house. The screen door slammed behind him.
Brody's hand found mine. Squeezed once.
I squeezed back.
"Well, that was a hoot," he said, always the first to break the tension so the rest of the world could relax a little.
John let out a long, slow breath beside me. When I looked over, his eyes were wet, but his jaw was set—stubborn and proud and aching in a way that made my chest hurt.
"You alright?" I asked.
He sniffed. Rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "I'll be alright when I stop wantin' to put my boot through that man's front teeth."
Hank, who had been standing silently through the entire exchange with the stoic disinterest of a man who'd seen everything twice, shifted his toothpick to the other side of his mouth.
"I'll hold him down for ya, John."
At that, my grandfather smiled.
While Brody played tour guide—a job that, he reminded me, was not his—I tracked Rhett down in the barn. He was in the tack room, hands braced on the workbench, staring at nothing. He didn't look up when I came in.
"Hey."
He exhaled. "Hey."
I leaned against the doorframe and crossed my arms. Gave him a minute. Sometimes silence was the kindest thing you could offer a man who was holding too much.
"I shoulda known," he said finally. "About all of it. Should've been payin' closer attention."
"You were a little busy havin' your own life go off the rails this summer."
That got a strained laugh out of him, and I smiled.
Rhett had said earlier that my granddad previously owning the ranch made me feel kinda like his sister.
But it had nothing to do with the land. A summer spent working side-by-side, being wrapped up in the same drama, and a mutual motto of the fewer words, the better would do that to two people—give them a certain appreciation for the other.
Brody was my person.
Sassy was the best—the only—girlfriend I'd ever had.
Rhett was the brother I'd never had.
And I was grateful as hell for all three of 'em.
Except I had some beef with a pixie that I'd be cooking up down in Bozeman real soon.
"Granddad wants to go for a ride," I said.
Rhett straightened. He turned to face me, and whatever he'd been wrestling with in the last twenty minutes had been tucked away somewhere deep—not resolved, just stored. He'd deal with it later, the way he dealt with everything. Steady and methodical and alone. "I'll saddle up a couple horses."
"Rhett." I waited until he looked at me. "She'll come back."
His eyes went glassy for half a second before he blinked it away.
"Yeah," he said. "Maybe."
He walked past me further into the barn, and I let him go.
The afternoon sun was still shining bright when John and I rode out onto the property.
I was on Maribel. She moved beneath me the same way she had been for weeks now—patient, unhurried, steady as a heartbeat.
Her ears flicked forward and back, reading the air, reading me.
Twenty-two years of fear, and this horse had walked me through it one quiet ride at a time over the last few weeks. Now, it felt as easy as breathing.
Beside me, John sat tall on a gray gelding Rhett had picked out—a ranch horse named Dutch who was calm enough for a man of eighty-something and sturdy enough not to make it look like charity.
John had waved off every offer of help mounting up, swung into the saddle with a stiffness that clearly cost him, and settled in like he'd never left.
We walked the fence line in silence for a while. Just the creak of leather, the soft thud of hooves on packed earth, the distant sound of cattle somewhere beyond the ridge. The Bitterroots rose up to the east, sharp and enormous against a sky so blue it looked fake.
John was looking at everything and saying nothing, which for a man who didn't waste words was its own kind of conversation.
I watched him clock the new fence posts, the repaired outbuildings, the places where the land had changed and the places where it hadn't.
His eyes lingered longest on the paddock—the one where Maribel and I had been circling all summer.
The one where my mother had broken her last horse.
"She'd ride right about here," he said, almost to himself. "Early mornin', before the sun got too high. Said the horses were calmer when the light was soft."
My throat burned. I said nothing.
"Prettiest thing you ever saw," he went on, his voice rougher now. "Her and whatever green-broke colt she was workin' that week. Patient as all hell. Got that from her mama."
I didn't know anything about my grandmother. Hadn't thought to ask. Hadn't been ready.
"Maybe you'll tell me about her sometime," I said.
John looked over at me, and something in his expression shifted—from the tight-jawed, sharp-eyed old man I'd met in that facility to something softer. Something that looked a lot like hope.
"I'd like that, Vinny."
We rode on. The sun moved slow across the sky, stretching our shadows long over the grass.
Maribel's stride was easy beneath me, and I let my body move with it—hips rocking, spine loose, hands quiet on the reins.
Muscle memory from a life I'd only lived for twelve years, coming back to me like a language my body hadn't entirely forgotten.
John was quiet for a long stretch, and when he spoke again, his voice was steadier.
"You gonna stay?"
The question settled over me like the afternoon light—warm and unavoidable.
I looked out over the land. Twenty-two hundred wild acres that had belonged to my family before they belonged to anyone else.
The barn where I'd mucked stalls and found a friend in a woman I thought I'd hate.
The paddock where my mother died and where I'd learned to sit a horse again at thirty-four years old.
Somewhere beyond all that was a house in town with its windows slowly being unboarded and a flickering porch light and a pink cat bed that a ridiculous, beautiful man had bought because he couldn't help himself.
The road to Idaho was still out there. Wide open. Going somewhere that wasn't here.
I thought about it for exactly one second.
"Yeah, Granddad." I looked over at him, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, the words didn't feel like a concession.
They felt like a choice.
"I'm gonna stay."