Chapter 7
Lark
“There is absolutely no universe in which purple is an appropriate color for a feeding card.”
Logan held the laminated card between two fingers as if it might bite him. He’d found it wedged behind the top shelf in the feed room, where it had been hiding for at least six months.
“That’s fuchsia,” I said.
“It’s an assault on the eyes.”
“It’s fuchsia, and it’s for the ferrets. Fuchsia for ferrets. It’s alliterative.”
“It’s magenta. And you built an entire color-coded system and then added alliteration?”
“The system is airtight. I will not be taking questions.”
He looked at me. Then he looked at the card. Then he looked at the wall where the other cards hung in their neat rows—blue for dogs, green for cats, yellow for the outdoor animals, orange for the rabbits and guinea pigs.
“Your system has a system,” he said.
“My system is flawless.”
“Your system requires a decoder ring.”
I snatched the card from him and hung it on the hook where it belonged. Tova, sprawled in the doorway of the feed room with her chin on her paws, watched the whole exchange without lifting her head.
We’d been reorganizing the feed room storage for the better part of an hour. Bags needed to be rotated, the shelves wiped down and restocked, the inventory sheet updated. It was the kind of work that didn’t require much conversation, but we’d been talking anyway.
Two weeks of working side by side had built something easy between us. He’d hand me a bag before I asked for it. I’d toss him the marker for labeling without looking up from the clipboard. The rhythm of it had become automatic, and I liked it more than I wanted to examine.
Logan was good company. His humor was dry, and it surfaced without warning, slipped in between tasks like he couldn’t help himself. He listened when I talked, which shouldn’t have been remarkable but was. And he worked without complaint, without shortcuts, without needing to be told what came next.
But damned if he didn’t look the same as the day he’d walked into Deja Brew.
The fatigue hadn’t budged. It sat in his face, in the lines that deepened when he thought nobody was watching, in the set of his jaw when he came into the barn each morning already dressed and working before I’d finished my first cup of coffee.
I’d come out of my house at five fifteen two mornings ago, and he’d already been halfway through the feeding rounds. Which meant he’d been up long before that.
Which meant the nights were bad.
I knew what that looked like. I’d sat across from enough veterans at Pawsitive to recognize the gap between a man who held it together in daylight and one who was actually resting.
Logan held it together. But the engine underneath was running on nothing, and it had been running on nothing since before he got here.
Tova shifted in the doorway and yawned. I looked at her. She looked back at me with those soft brown eyes that didn’t ask for anything and didn’t miss much.
Asking him to let Tova trail him during the day had been a start, but it wasn’t enough. The days weren’t his problem. I needed to get that dog into his cabin at night, and I needed a reason that didn’t sound like what it actually was, because no doubt he wouldn’t accept that.
“Question,” Logan said from behind the shelf. “Why does Clarence have a feeding card at all? He eats whatever he wants and screams at anyone who tries to stop him.”
“Clarence has a feeding card because every animal has a feeding card. That’s the system.”
“Clarence ate a button off my jacket yesterday.” He held up a bag of kibble and waited for me to point to the right shelf. I pointed. He slid it into place.
“That’s not on the card.”
“I’m aware it’s not on the card. I’m saying the card is irrelevant. Clarence has rejected the card.”
I capped my marker. “Clarence is on a journey.”
My phone rang.
I pulled it from my back pocket and glanced at the screen. The number wasn’t one I had saved, but the area code registered somewhere in the back of my brain. Upstate New York. I didn’t have to worry about it—nobody I knew there would be calling me.
I put it on speaker and set it on the shelf so I could keep working. “This is Lark.”
A pause. Then a voice I hadn’t heard in six years filled the feed room.
“Eleanor.”
My hand stopped on the clipboard. The name hung in the air between the shelves, and for two full seconds, I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I stood there with my fingers locked on the edge of the board and my brain trying to catch up to what my ears already knew.
Then I grabbed the phone off the shelf and killed the speaker.
“I need to take this,” I said to Logan. My voice came out level. My face, I was less sure about.
I didn’t wait for his response. I walked out of the feed room, through the barn, and out into the daylight before I said another word.
“Mother.” The word came out the way it always had. Formal. Practiced. Set in stone since before I could remember. But why was she calling? “Is everyone all right? Is Dad—”
“Everyone’s fine, Eleanor. Your father’s fine. I’m just calling to check in.”
To check in. As though we’d spoken last month. As though six years of silence was a gap in a conversation and not a wall I’d built with both hands.
“Right. It’s been…a while,” I said. I shouldn’t be surprised Mother had gotten this number. The family certainly had the means to find out where I was and how to contact me. They’d just never made the effort.
“It has. I’ve been meaning to call.”
For six years. She’d been meaning to call for six years. I kept walking. The east paddock was on my left. Duchess stood at the far rail, watching me with her ears forward.
“So. Tell me what you’ve been up to. Your father and I don’t hear much.”
Because I stopped being your daughter the night I showed up bleeding and you told me to go back to my husband.
I didn’t say that. Why bother? “I run an animal therapy and rescue program called Pawsitive Connections in Montana. We raise and train service animal placements, therapy work with veterans and kids, rehabilitation and rehoming.”
I heard myself laying it out in clean, careful sentences. Choosing the words that sounded most like a real career, because even now, even after everything, some part of me was still translating my life into language she might accept.
A pause on the other end. One beat too long.
“Well. That sounds lovely, Eleanor. And you can make a living doing that?”
“I do fine.”
“In Montana? That’s a long way from New York.”
One of the many reasons I’d chosen Garnet Bend. “In Montana.”
Another pause. “Have you thought about what you might want to do longer term? Your father mentioned there might be opportunities in the city if you ever wanted to come back east. Something more…stable.”
I stopped walking. Stood in the middle of my property—forty acres, the barn I’d rebuilt, the paddocks I’d fenced, the animals I kept alive every single day—and listened to my mother suggest I might want to think about doing something more real.
“This is what I do, Mother. It’s not a phase.”
“Of course not. I didn’t mean that.” She had already moved on. “Carla made partner, did you hear? Hamilton, Reeves, and Pratt. Your father is just thrilled. And David got promoted to senior VP at the firm. He’s been traveling constantly, but he seems happy.”
“That’s great. Tell them both congratulations.”
“I will. They’d love to hear from you, you know.”
No, they wouldn’t. They hadn’t called either.
The line went quiet for a moment. I could hear something in the background on her end. A clock, maybe. Or a television on low. The sounds of a house I hadn’t stood in for six years, carrying through the phone like a door left open.
“I do have some news that I thought you should hear from me rather than someone else.” Her tone shifted. Still polished, still measured, but with something underneath it. “Carter and his second wife have separated. The divorce was finalized last month.”
I could not care less if Carter Hollis had divorced a dozen women since our marriage. The best thing about my life here was that he was nowhere even remotely attached to it.
“That’s a shame.” I forced the words out since I knew the niceties were expected.
“It is a shame. He’s been having a very difficult time, Eleanor. He’s lost friends over it. His mother is beside herself.”
“That’s too bad for his mother.”
“He’s been asking about you.”
The field around me went very still. The breeze that had been pushing through the grass dropped. Duchess tossed her head at the far fence, but I barely registered it.
“Why would Carter be asking about me?”
“I think he’s reflecting, Eleanor. Going through something like this makes people look back. He cared about you very much.”
“He’s the reason I have a scar on my arm, Mother.”
I kept it deliberately unemotional. Said it the way I’d say it was Tuesday. The sky was blue. Water was wet. Carter Hollis had done that.
The silence on her end lasted four seconds. I counted.
“Every marriage has its difficulties. I’m not saying what happened between you was—”
“I came to your house bleeding, and you told me I was being difficult. You told me to go back to him. I had to drive myself to the emergency room for stitches because my own parents wouldn’t help me.”
“That’s not exactly—”
“That is exactly what happened.”
Another silence. Longer. When she spoke again, her voice had cooled by several degrees, the way it always did when the conversation stopped being something she could manage.
“I didn’t call to argue, Eleanor. I called because I care about you, and I thought you should know about Carter.”
“You called because Carter asked you to.” His parents and my parents had been best friends as long as I could remember. That was evidently still true, despite everything.
“That’s not fair.”
“I think it’s very fair. I think you haven’t picked up the phone in six years, and the first time you do, his name is in your mouth. You can care about Carter all you want, Mother. But you don’t get to put his name in my ear and call it concern for me.”