Chapter Twenty-Six
Two days of staying inside the gate like a good wife, and Grace wanted to claw her own skin off.
She’d weeded the garden. Twice. Scrubbed the kitchen floor until the wood turned pale.
Mended every torn shirt in the house and reorganized the pantry, which nobody had asked her to do, and which Logan would probably re-reorganize the second she turned her back, because the man could not abide a spice jar facing the wrong direction.
And still. Two days. The gate sat right there, thirty yards from the porch, and she couldn’t walk through it.
Breakfast dragged. Logan ate his eggs with that careful fork work he did, separating the whites from the yolk like they’d committed separate crimes. Mason talked about a calf born overnight. Thomas kicked Jonah’s boot under the table for no reason.
A normal morning. The scrape of knives on tin and the tick of that mantel clock she’d started counting in her sleep: fourteen ticks a minute, eight hundred and forty an hour, all of them inside these walls.
The men cleared out one by one. Logan squeezed her shoulder on the way past. Three days ago, that touch would’ve sent heat all the way down her spine. Today it landed and she couldn’t even—
She just sat there.
Rafe lingered. He always did after breakfast, working on his coffee like he had a personal grudge against the last half-inch. He watched her over the rim of the cup. Not staring. Just... there. Waiting. The way he did right before he said the thing you didn’t want to hear.
Grace picked at a thread on the tablecloth, listened to the clock ticking, and tried to remember what the bench in town smelled like. Pine, maybe. Warm pine and dust and that sweet horse-sweat smell that hung over Main Street in the mornings.
“You look like a barn cat in a rainstorm.”
She glanced up. “What?”
“All hunched over, tail tucked, mad at the weather but can’t do nothin’ about it.” He set his cup down. “How long you gonna sit at that table feelin’ sorry for yourself before you tell me what’s eatin’ you?”
“Nothin’s eatin’ at me. I just…”
She tattled it all out.
The gate. The fences. The way Logan looked at her every time she stepped off the porch, as if she might bolt.
How she couldn’t ride to town or walk the creek path or even take Miriam past the chicken coop without one of the brothers happening to wander in the same direction, casual as you please, like they just felt like strolling that way.
“I ain’t a prisoner, Rafe. I know that. I got a roof and a family and more food than I ever had in New York, and I ain’t ungrateful. I swear I ain’t. But I came two thousand miles to stop feelin’ trapped, and now I’m—”
Her voice cracked. She pressed her lips together and stared at the tablecloth.
Rafe topped off his coffee. Took a slow sip. Set it down with that precise click he did, cup handle pointing east, same as every morning.
“Logan’s mama used to say he’d organize the wind if he could get it to hold still.”
Grace’s throat tightened.
“He ain’t tryin’ to lock you up, girl. He’s tryin’ to keep you alive. There’s a difference.”
“It don’t feel like a difference.”
“No. I reckon it don’t.” Rafe leaned back. “But that boy lost his mother on this land, Grace. And he blamed himself every single day since, even though it weren’t his fault, and I’ve told him so ‘til I’m blue. He ain’t gonna stop bein’ afraid just because you ask nice.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Just… sit here?”
“You’re supposed to talk to him. Don’t argue. Don’t holler. Sit him down and tell him what you told me.”
“I told him that two days ago!”
“He was fresh spooked then. Ain’t so now.”
She sighed. “What do I even tell him?”
“That you’re unhappy. That you’re suffocatin’. Because that stubborn son of mine would rather eat his own boots than see you miserable, but he can’t fix a thing he don’t know about.”
“He knows, Rafe. He’s right there. He can see—”
“Men don’t see what’s right in front of ’em, Grace. That’s about the truest thing I know. You gotta spell it out. Slow. In small words.” He chuckled. “And maybe twice.”
She laughed.
“He’ll listen, I promise.” Rafe shrugged. “He won’t like it. He’ll get that look on his face like you just told him the barn’s on fire. But he’ll listen. Because it’s you.”
She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand before anything spilled over. “Alright.”
“Good.” Rafe drained his cup and pushed back from the table. “Now. Where’s my grandbaby? I ain’t held her in two whole hours, and that’s just plain wrong.”
***
Miriam went down for her nap after the usual twenty-minute negotiation, the rocking, the frog song, and a full refusal to let go of Grace’s collar until sleep won. Grace tucked the red horse against her cheek and backed out of the nursery.
Rafe settled into the chair by the door with his whittling knife. “Go on. I got her.”
“I ain’t talking to Logan yet,” she huffed. “I got chores.”
Rafe chuckled.
Grace made her way to the barn, grabbed a curry comb, and started on Captain, who pinned his ears flat and bit the crossties every thirty seconds because Captain hated grooming the way Grace hated mice.
“Hold still, you miserable—”
A shape flashed outside, moving along the south fenceline.
Grace’s hands stopped.
It was too thin and hunched to be Logan, and it moved different from how Mason, Thomas, and Jonah did. She’d learned how all of them moved by now, the way you learned a house’s creaks.
Her heart kicked hard against her breastbone.
She should go get someone. But Logan rode the north pasture with Mason. Thomas and Jonah hammered new posts along the east line. Rafe sat upstairs with the baby. By the time she ran to any of them and explained—
The shape slipped past the woodpile and cut toward the south field. Toward the spot where somebody had dug that hole that broke the heifer’s leg.
Grace dropped the curry comb.
Every smart thing she’d ever learned—every New York instinct that had pulled her through alleys where smart girls didn’t linger—screamed at her to go to the house, get the rifle, and wait.
But the shape moved fast. It’d hit the tree line in two minutes, and then it’d vanish into the aspens.
Two more weeks of locked gates and checked windows and Logan’s eyes following her across every room.
She grabbed Penny’s bridle off the hook. Her hands shook through the saddling. The girth ended up too loose, so she had to fix it before hauling herself up. Penny danced sideways with her ears pricked.
Grace kicked her into a canter and cleared the barn door.
The shape had reached the fence. A man. Dark coat, hat pulled low, moving fast.
“Hey! Hey!” Grace spurred Penny on. “Stop right there!”
He ducked through the fence rails and ran. Grace leaned forward, pushed Penny harder, and aimed for the gap where the rails sagged. Penny took it clean.
The man spun. Reached into his coat.
The shot split the air like a whip crack. He’d aimed straight up, and the sound rattled her teeth. Penny screamed. Front legs came up, and the sky tilted sideways, and Grace grabbed for the mane and missed.
The ground hit her hip first. Then her shoulder. Then her ankle twisted under her as the rest of her body rolled over it, and a white-hot bolt fired up from her foot to her knee. She bit down so hard on her own tongue that she tasted copper.
Penny bolted.
The man ran.
***
The gunshot punched straight through the north pasture. Logan pulled the bay mare up short. Mason’s horse spooked sideways.
South. Came from the south field, near the—
He dug his heels in.
The mare tore across the pasture at a dead gallop, as Mason, somewhere behind him, hollered something he didn’t catch and didn’t care about. The south fence came up fast. He had the mare jump it and cut along the tree line toward the spot where the heifer had broken her leg.
Nothing. Empty field, trampled grass, the hole still half-filled from where Thomas had shoveled dirt back in last week. Then—fifty yards east, moving slowly along the fenceline—a shape. Too small. Walking wrong, hitching sideways with each step, bracing one arm against the rail posts.
Grace.
His chest caved in, like somebody had reached between his ribs and squeezed.
He rode up to her and swung down. Grace leaned on a fence post with her right foot lifted off the ground, dirt smeared up one side of her dress, and her hair half-loose and full of grass.
She looked up at him with her jaw set in that way she did when she’d already decided how this conversation would go and had picked the outcome she liked best.
“Before you start—”
“What the hell happened?”
“I said before you start—”
“Grace, I heard a goddamn gunshot from the north pasture.” He grabbed her arms. Ran his hands down them. Checked her ribs and her shoulders and turned her halfway around. No blood. No holes. His hands shook, and he couldn’t make them stop. “Who shot at you?”
“He shot up into the air. Wasn’t aimin’ at me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who! Some fella in a dark coat was moving along the south fence, headed for the aspens. I saw him from the barn and I—” She flinched when she shifted her weight. “I went after him.”
“You went after him?”
“On Penny, yeah. He spooked her, and I came off and twisted my ankle, and the man ran, and—Logan, you’re hurtin’ my arms.”
He let go and stepped back.
“You chased a stranger. Alone. On horseback. After everything I—after we talked about this.” He clenched his fist. “It’s been two days!”
“I know!”
“Then what in God’s name possessed you to—”
“Because he was right there! Right there, Logan, and if I’d gone to the house and fetched somebody he’d have gone, and we’d be right back where we started, checkin’ locks and ridin’ fences and findin’ nothin’!”
“So, instead you’re standin’ here with a busted ankle and a bullet over your head, and we still got nothin’!”
“Oh, get off my—”
“Except now I know whoever’s out there carries a gun and my wife rides straight at him like she’s got a death wish!”
The word wife came out rougher than he meant. Or maybe exactly how he meant. Hard to tell when his whole body ran hot and sick all at once, like he had a fever.
Grace’s eyes brightened. She wouldn’t cry, of course. Grace never cried when she fought. She would cry after, alone, when she thought Logan couldn’t hear her through the thin walls. But the tears stood close enough.
“I ain’t got a death wish, Logan. I was tryin’ to help.”
“I don’t need that kind of help.” He dragged both hands through his hair. “I need you alive. That’s the help I need. You, breathin’, in one piece, not lyin’ in a field with a—”
His throat closed up. Just locked, the way a gate latch caught when it rusted shut, and he had to stand there with his mouth open like a fool while the rest of that sentence rotted behind his teeth.
Grace watched him with that look she got sometimes, the one that cut straight past every fence and wall he’d ever built and found the scared kid underneath who’d ridden home to empty boots on a porch.
“Logan.”
“Don’t.”
He crouched down and took her right boot in both hands.
She hissed when he eased it off. The ankle had already started swelling, and the skin had gone tight and shiny.
But she hadn’t broken any bones. He’d seen that, and this moved wrong for it; the bones tracked where they should, but she flinched hard when he pressed the outside edge.
“A sprain.” He pulled her sock off. “Bad one.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That don’t make me feel better.”
“It ain’t supposed to make you feel better, it’s supposed to make you stop fussin’.”
Something in his chest just... unclenched. Like somebody had pulled a cork. Only this hollow, shaky thing remained where all the heat used to be, and underneath it, plain as daylight…
Grace. Chewing a pencil over a letter to Jonah. Kneeling in his mother’s flower beds. Singing the frog song off-key with Miriam’s fist in her collar. Every single morning in his kitchen for the rest of his life, and if she wasn’t there, if that chair sat empty—
His stomach dropped straight through the ground.
He’d been yelling at her for the same reason a man kicked a wall after he tripped over it.
“C’mere.” He turned around and crouched lower. “Get on.”
“I can walk.”
“Grace. Get on my back.”
She sighed the sigh of a woman who knew she’d lost a war and climbed on. Her arms hooked around his neck. Her chin settled against his shoulder, and her breath hit warm on the side of his throat.
He carried her across the field. Neither of them talked for a while. Just his boots in the grass and her weight against his back and the afternoon sun pressing down on them like a hand.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said.
“You should be.”
“I am.”
“Good.”
“But Grace—” He hitched her higher. “I can’t lose you. I know I say it wrong and I know I make it sound like orders, and I know that drives you up the wall, but that’s the whole of it. I—”
“I know.” Her arms tightened. “I know, Logan.”
“I ain’t tryin’ to pen you in.”
“Yeah, you are. But you’re tryin’ for the right reasons, and that counts for somethin’.” She pressed her forehead against the back of his neck. “And I shouldn’t have chased him. That was fool-headed, and I know it.”
“Little bit.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
He laughed. “When we get home, I’m gonna bind that ankle, and you’re gonna sit in the chair and not move for the rest of the day.”
“Fine.”
“And I’m gonna bring you supper. And you’re gonna let me.”
“Fine. Lord, you are the bossiest man alive.”
“That a yes?”
Her lips pressed against the back of his neck. Quick and soft, like she had a thousand of them, like kissing Logan Foster on the back of his sunburned neck while he carried her across a field ranked as about as remarkable as breathing.
“That’s a yes,” she said.
Mason met them at the gate, already talking too fast, something about Penny turning up at the barn lathered and wild-eyed. Logan carried Grace up the porch steps and through the front door and set her down in Pa’s chair.
Grace opened her mouth.
“No.”
“You ain’t even let me—”
He pressed his finger against her lips. “Hush.”
“Don’t you hush—”
“Already hushed you. Too late.”
He knelt down and wrapped her ankle with a strip of clean cotton from the mending basket the way Ma had taught him after he’d twisted his own ankle jumping out of the hayloft when he was twelve.
Grace watched him with those honey-brown eyes. Her hair stuck out in six directions, and dirt streaked her dress. She’d bitten her lip, and she reached down and cupped his jaw in one dirty hand.
“You’re a real pain in my backside, Logan Foster.”
He chuckled and kissed her palm.