Chapter 6
Logan
The door at Murphy’s Hardware fought back when I pushed it. A thick wooden slab on hinges that needed oil badly enough that every customer announced their arrival whether they wanted to or not.
The inside was narrow and deep. Floor-to-ceiling shelves packed tight with inventory that had been organized by someone who understood their own system and nobody else’s. A man behind the counter with reading glasses on a chain looked up when I walked in.
“Hey there. What can I do for you today?”
“I’m here to pick up an order for Lark Monroe. Fence wire, staples, and a couple bags of quick-set.”
“Right. Give me a minute. It’s in the back.”
He disappeared through a doorway. I stood at the counter and waited, looking at a pegboard display of carabiners and small flashlights. The front door groaned open behind me.
“No way. Logan?”
I turned. Beckett Sinclair stood a few feet inside the door with a paper coffee cup in one hand and sunglasses pushed up on his head. His face broke into the same wide grin he’d flashed multiple times during that Warrior Security op a couple weeks ago.
“What are you doing here? Hunter said you left town.”
“Plans changed. I’m working out at Pawsitive Connections. Lark needed a ranch hand.”
Beckett’s eyebrows went up. He stood there for a second, coffee cup halfway to his mouth, and I watched the surprise land and then settle into something he didn’t say out loud.
Something in his posture eased, and the grin that followed reached his eyes in a way he probably didn’t intend for me to notice.
“Pawsitive,” he said. “No kidding.”
“No kidding.”
“You know, I trained security dogs out there for a while.” He leaned against the doorframe and crossed one ankle over the other. “Good luck getting Lark to actually let you do anything. She’ll say she needs help and then do it all herself before you get your boots on.”
Truer words never spoken. “That’s been my experience so far.”
“How’s the parrot?”
“Foul-mouthed.”
“Clarence never changes.” Beckett shook his head. “That bird called Audra a word on her second day that I won’t repeat in polite company. Fortunately, Audra laughed so hard she had to sit down. It was the first real laugh I ever heard from her.”
He looked at his coffee cup for a second. Turned it in his hand, obviously lost in a private memory. Then his face turned a little darker.
“Lark hired Audra when she had nothing. I mean nothing. She showed up with the clothes on her back and a story she couldn’t tell, and Lark paid her cash, gave her work, didn’t ask a single question.
Just handed her a purpose and let her breathe.
I wouldn’t be married to the love of my life if it weren’t for Lark.
Hell, I don’t know if Audra would still be alive if it weren’t for Lark. So, you’re with good people there.”
I thought about a woman in a coffee shop at five thirty in the morning, handing a stranger a flyer and a job and the keys to a cabin on her property. No background check. No references. Just Hunter’s three-word text and her own read on a man with no plan and nowhere to go.
I didn’t get the chance to sit with that. The front door groaned open again, and Hunter walked in. He saw me and stopped. The same surprise I’d watched cross Beckett’s face, followed by something quieter that he tucked away behind a nod.
“Logan.” Hunter extended his hand. I took it.
His grip was the same as the last time: firm, steady, holding a beat longer than necessary.
The last time had been in the Resting Warrior parking lot at four forty-five in the morning, and neither of us had known if we’d see each other again.
“Good to see you. Surprised to see you.”
“He’s working at Pawsitive,” Beckett said. “Ranch hand.”
Hunter let go of my hand and looked at me. Really looked, the way he had that morning in the parking lot, reading whatever he could find in my face. Whatever he saw now must have been different from what he’d seen then, because something behind his expression settled.
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s real good. How’s Lark doing?”
“Busy. She had an open house a couple days ago for the therapy program. Therapists and families, kids working with the animals. It was something to see.”
“She does those every month. Puts more into them than she’ll ever admit.
” Hunter leaned against the counter. “Jada still talks about her time out there. She was in a bad way when she started working for Lark. Didn’t know who she was, barely knew where she was.
Lark just handed her a shovel, pointed at the stalls, and said they needed mucking. ”
That didn’t sound terribly different from Audra’s story.
“And then there were the kittens,” Beckett said.
The corner of Hunter’s mouth moved. “Three of them. Their mama died, and Lark asked Jada to foster them. Knew exactly what she was doing, putting those kittens in Jada’s hands.” He shook his head. “We’ve still got them. Sir Pounce, Biscuits, and Moose. They run the house now.”
Beckett grinned. “That’s almost as bad as the puppies Travis and I had to take care of that one Christmas, thanks to Lark. It’s like she’s a pet matchmaker.”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and let the picture shift. Not about the animals, about the woman herself.
Lark had told me she’d had friends come through and help over the years. Extra hands, short-term. She’d made it sound like a staffing situation, a rotating door of people who pitched in and moved on.
That wasn’t what this was. Audra, who’d shown up with nothing and a story she couldn’t tell. Jada, who didn’t even know her own name. People who’d been in trouble, running, breaking apart, and Lark had opened the door without asking what they were running from.
Which meant she’d looked at me in Deja Brew that morning—a man with no plan and nowhere to go and exhaustion carved into every line of his face—and she’d known I was one more person who needed catching.
The man behind the counter came back with a coil of fence wire, a box of galvanized staples, and two bags of quick-set. “That’ll do it for Lark’s order.”
Hunter and Beckett helped me carry it all out to the truck.
“Listen.” Hunter placed one of the bags of cement into the bed of the truck. “If you ever want to pick up some part-time work with Warrior Security, the offer’s there. Lachlan’s been dealing with a drug operation moving through the county, and we’re helping out. We could use an extra set of hands.”
I leaned against the truck. “I appreciate it. But Pawsitive’s keeping me busy right now.” And I wasn’t going to take a chance on another incident like at the hotel.
Hunter nodded. He didn’t push.
“Still good to have you around,” Hunter said when I climbed into the truck.
“Good to be around.” I gave them a quick wave. “I’ll catch you guys later.”
I picked up Princess Whiskers’s prescription food from the vet clinic next and drove back to Pawsitive.
The barn was quiet when I carried the first bag of quick-set inside.
I set it by the feed room and went back for the wire.
On the second trip, I noticed the silence.
No music from the speaker Lark almost always kept playing.
No voice narrating the day to the animals the way she did from dawn until dark.
I found her in the feed room. Sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up. Dobby was pressed into her side, his heavy head in her lap, and her arms were wrapped around him in a way that had nothing casual about it.
She was holding on.
Her eyes were closed. Her face was turned down toward the dog. I stopped in the doorway, not sure what to do. Dobby saw me first. His tail thumped once against the concrete. Lark’s head came up.
Her face, for half a second, was someone I hadn’t met yet.
The brightness that I’d come to expect from her was gone, and what lived underneath it was rawer than I was prepared for.
Her mouth was set in a line that looked like it had been holding back something heavy for a long time, and her eyes, when they found mine, had a flatness to them that made my chest tighten.
She looked like a woman who’d been carrying a weight she hadn’t told anyone about, and for a few minutes in an empty feed room with a dog pressed against her ribs, she’d put it down.
Then she picked it back up. I watched it happen before my eyes.
Her spine straightened first, then her shoulders, then her mouth softened into something that wasn’t quite a smile but was close enough to pass. By the time she stood and brushed hay dust off her jeans, the woman I’d seen on the floor was gone and the one I knew was back in her place.
“Hey. You’re back. Get everything we needed from town?”
“All of it. Princess Whiskers’s food too.”
“Perfect. You are now officially my favorite errand-runner. Okay, only errand-runner. But, still.”
“You okay?” It came out before I’d decided to ask it.
“What? Yeah. Of course.” She picked up the clipboard she’d left on the feed shelf and tucked it under her arm.
“Dobby gets clingy in the afternoons. I was just giving him some attention. Did you eat? There’s leftover soup in the farmhouse if you want it.
Nothing fancy. Whatever vegetables I had lying around. ”
“I’m fine.”
“There’s bread too. From the bakery. Lena dropped it off yesterday. I’d grab some before I get to it, because I will eat all of it. Zero self-control when it comes to bread.”
Every sentence aimed at me. Every question about what I needed, whether I’d eaten, whether I was comfortable. The conversation tipped away from her and toward me so smoothly that if I hadn’t been watching it happen, I’d have missed the pivot entirely.
I let it go. I didn’t have standing to push her on what was really bothering her.
“Before you head out for chores and stuff,” she said, “can I ask a favor?” She walked toward the kennels, and I followed. She stopped at Tova’s run. The yellow lab was lying on her side, her tail sweeping the floor in slow arcs when she saw Lark.