Chapter 5 #2
I’d cooked because someone had to. And despite what the guys at the station liked to joke about, I could handle a few simple dishes without setting off the smoke alarm.
I had prepared a simple meal: grilled chicken, salad, fresh bread I'd picked up from the bakery in town.
Nothing fancy. Just food, served on plates that had belonged to my grandmother, at the table she'd refinished herself over the course of one long summer. I kept doing that—anchoring things to her, like as long as I remembered where everything came from, I wouldn’t lose it too.
This table had hosted forty years of Murphy family dinners: Thanksgiving feasts, birthday celebrations, ordinary Tuesday nights when the family gathered just because they could.
Now I sat at the head, in the place my father used to take without thinking about it.
Across from me was Riley—my wife in the most technical sense of the word—and beside her, Mia, who wouldn’t meet my eyes.
We looked like a family if you didn’t know the story.
Three people filling the right seats, going through the motions, trying to make something recognizable out of circumstances that hadn’t given us much choice.
Mia pushed food around her plate without eating. A piece of chicken, relocated from one side to the other. Salad, rearranged into a small mountain. Bread, untouched.
Riley, at least, was eating. She took a bite of chicken, chewed, and her eyebrows lifted slightly.
That small reaction felt like a victory I hadn’t known I was hoping for.
"This is actually good." Riley glanced up from her plate, fork paused halfway to her mouth, one eyebrow lifting just enough to make the comment feel earned.
"You don't have to sound so surprised."
She tilted her head, eyes steady on me, weighing the comment like she weighed everything else.
"The eggs incident set certain expectations."
I winced. She was never going to let me live that down. A year ago, I'd been on breakfast duty at the station after a brutal overnight call. Everyone was exhausted, running on fumes, and I'd volunteered to make eggs because it seemed simple enough. Scrambled eggs. How hard could it be?
Harder than I'd thought, apparently. I'd gotten distracted by a call coming in on the radio, left the pan on too long, then tried to salvage it by turning up the heat. The result was a disaster. Rubbery on the outside, somehow still runny in the middle.
I'd served them anyway, hoping no one would notice.
Three guys called in sick the next day.
The crew had given me grief about it for weeks. Owen had flat-out refused to eat anything I cooked for a month.
“I’ve been practicing.” I shifted in my chair, eyes dropping to my plate as I nudged my fork against it. “A man can’t live under that kind of reputation forever.”
Riley almost smiled. Almost. A flicker at the corner of her mouth, so brief I questioned my own eyesight—but something in her eyes told me I hadn’t imagined it.
“I have many talents. Cooking was just a late bloomer.”
Riley made a noncommittal sound, eyes still on her plate. “Uh huh.”
The quiet settled again, but it didn’t press so hard this time. Forks moved. Someone took a sip of water. The air shifted, just enough to breathe in. We fell into an easy pattern for a few beats—small, ordinary, almost normal—before the moment slipped away.
I glanced at Mia, hoping she might join in. She was still staring at her plate, her fork making slow circles through the salad dressing. Whatever softness I'd glimpsed in the room had retreated again, tucked away somewhere I couldn't reach.
I kept waiting for it to feel normal. For the rhythm of family to settle in—the easy back-and-forth, the kind of silence that didn’t need explaining. Riley wasn’t the problem. I knew her. Trusted her. Could read her well enough to follow her lead.
It was the three of us together that felt unfamiliar. Riley and I knew how to exist in the same space. Mia didn’t. She was still figuring out where she fit—and whether she fit at all.
Maybe that was okay. Maybe that was how it always started—not with certainty, but with patience. With showing up again the next day and trusting that, eventually, it would begin to feel like ours.
Or maybe I was kidding myself.
After dinner, I suggested showing Mia the barn.
She didn't want to go. I could see it in the way her shoulders tightened, the way she glanced at Riley like she was looking for an escape route. But Riley caught my eye over her head and gave a small nod, then put a hand on Mia's back.
"Go on," her voice stayed calm, matter-of-fact. "I'll clean up here."
Mia's jaw set, but she followed me out the back door, dragging her feet the whole way. I could feel her distrust like a physical presence, a wall between us that I had no idea how to climb.
The barn smelled like hay and horse and old wood, the particular sweetness that had been part of my life for as long as I could remember. Late afternoon light slanted through the gaps in the boards, catching dust motes, turning everything gold.
"This is Buck." I paused at the first stall. "He's twelve, steady as they come. Good for beginners."
Buck, true to form, stretched his neck over the stall door and huffed at Mia, warm breath brushing the wood. His lip twitched, hopeful.
Mia held her ground. Toes angled out, already planning distance. One hand tightened on her backpack strap. The other hovered, undecided.
Buck nudged the door. She startled—just a hitch in her shoulders—then went still again, eyes fixed on his mouth, tracking every movement.
"And this is Ranger. He was my grandmother's horse. Still thinks he runs the place."
Ranger ignored us entirely, more interested in his hay.
"Dusty's down at the end. She's the friendliest. Loves apples, hates carrots. Very opinionated."
We moved through the barn, stall by stall. Mia said nothing, but I noticed her shoulders starting to relax. Her arms uncrossed, just slightly. The horses had that effect on people. They didn't ask questions or make demands. They just existed, warm and solid and uncomplicated.
Then we reached the last stall.
Honey pressed against the far wall the moment we approached. Ears flat against her head, eyes wide and white-rimmed, whole body trembling. She was a beautiful mare, chestnut with a white blaze down her nose, but you had to look past the fear to see it.
“This is Honey. She’s not like the others.”
Mia edged closer to the stall door—just one step. The first she’d taken toward any of them.
Honey jerked back, pressing harder into the boards, hooves scraping once in panic.
Mia stopped. Watched. Her head tilted, just enough.
“She’s scared.”
It wasn’t a question.
"Yeah. Someone hurt her before I got her. I don't know the details. Don't think I want to." I leaned against the stall, keeping my voice low and even. "She doesn't trust people yet. It takes her a long time to warm up to anyone."
Mia stared at the mare with an intensity that made my chest ache. Something passed between them, some silent recognition I wasn't part of.
"How do you make her not scared?" Mia asked.
"You don't make her anything." I'd learned that lesson the hard way, in the early months when I'd tried to rush Honey's healing and it only made things worse. "You just show up every day. Be patient and quiet. You let her know you're there, and you wait. Until she believes you're safe."
Mia was quiet for a long moment. Then, slowly, she reached her hand toward the stall.
Honey flinched.
But Mia didn't pull back. She held her hand there, steady, not pushing forward but not retreating either. Waiting.
After a long moment, Honey's ears twitched. Just barely. Just enough.
I held my breath.
She nodded, still watching Honey, and I saw something shift in her expression. Not trust—not yet. But the possibility of it. The first crack in the wall.
“Tomorrow,” she murmured. A pause. “Can I come back? To see her.”
"You can come back whenever you want."
It wasn't much. But it was a start.
The house was quiet by ten.
Riley had retreated to the guest room after helping with the dishes, murmuring something about being tired, not quite meeting my eyes. Mia had gone to bed without a word, closing her door with a soft click that felt louder than a slam.
And I was alone with the silence I'd lived in for years, except now it was different. Now there were people on the other side of these walls. People I was responsible for. People whose presence changed the shape of every room.
I lay in bed and listened to the house settle around me. The creak of old boards, the groan of the foundation—sounds I'd grown up with and barely noticed anymore. But tonight I noticed. Tonight, everything felt amplified.
Through the wall, I heard Riley pacing.
Soft footsteps, back and forth, back and forth. Restless energy that couldn't find an outlet. I pictured her in the guest room, surrounded by unfamiliar walls, trying to convince herself she'd made the right choice.
I knew that feeling. I'd been living with it for days.
This wasn't how I'd pictured filling this house.
Claire had been the face of every dream for three years.
Now she was in Denver building the life she'd actually wanted, and I was listening to my coworker pace in the guest room.
A woman I'd worked beside for two years but never really known. A woman who was now, legally, my wife.
The pacing stopped. Silence settled, thin and watchful. Then Riley’s door eased open, the hinge protesting under its breath. Her steps followed in the hallway—measured, careful, as if the floor might object.
The bathroom door closed with a muted click. A pause. Water came on low, steady, the kind meant not to carry. Pipes rattled once, then quieted. Small sounds, deliberate ones. Someone moving through a house that wasn’t hers yet, trying not to leave a mark.
I stared at the ceiling, breath shallow, listening to the house settle around me. Sleep stayed just out of reach.
This was supposed to be an arrangement. A fix. Words on a page, boxes checked, a solution that made sense in daylight but unraveled in the dark.
But lying there in the dark, listening to them struggle through their first night under my roof, I felt the weight of something bigger than I'd bargained for. I'd wanted a wife on paper. What I'd gotten was two people in my house, in my life, filling up the silence I'd grown so used to.
I kept telling myself Riley and Mia weren’t family. Not really. Just names on the same paperwork. A temporary shape. A year, maybe less. Then we’d go back to being coworkers who passed each other in the hallway, small nods, nothing owed. That was the plan. That was the deal.
Intentions had a way of warping once real people entered the equation.
And something about the sound of Mia's small voice asking to come back to the barn, about Riley's restless pacing through an unfamiliar house, made me wonder if I'd miscalculated.
If I'd signed up for something simple and stumbled into something that could hurt.
I wasn't ready for that. Wasn't sure I'd ever be ready.
But ready or not, they were here. And tomorrow, we'd have to figure out how to live in the same space without tripping over each other. How to be a family that wasn't a family. How to pretend this was real enough to fool the courts without letting it become real enough to matter.
The house shifted around me, wood creaking, beams sighing. My body gave in before my mind did, the weight of the day finally winning. My eyes closed.
For tonight, it was enough that we were all under the same roof.
It had to be enough.