Chapter 4
Callie
There was a tin on my desk.
Small. Square. Matte black with gold lettering. I stood in the doorway of the office at seven forty-five on a Monday morning with my bag on my shoulder and my keys still in my hand and stared at it like it might detonate.
It wasn't a bomb. It was tea.
Loose-leaf Earl Grey. The exact brand — not just Earl Grey, not the generic supermarket kind, but the specific loose-leaf blend I drank every morning. The one I kept in the kitchen cupboard and brought to the office in a ziplock because the store in town didn't carry it.
Just the tin, centered on my desk, next to my keyboard, and a folded scrap of paper tucked underneath. I pulled it out. Messy handwriting, the kind that suggested a man who held pens the way he held reins — functional, not pretty.
Friends bring friends tea. It's in the handbook. Page 7. — C
I pressed my lips together. I was not going to smile. I was absolutely not going to smile.
I smiled.
I picked it up. Turned it over. The gold lettering was elegant in a way that told me someone had gone looking for this — not grabbed off a shelf, not ordered on impulse. Someone had known exactly what I drank and gone out of their way to find it.
My twenty-seventh birthday, Preston gave me a necklace.
Emerald pendant. Beautiful. Expensive. I'd told him three times — once at dinner, once in the car, once while he was reading his phone — that I wanted the leather-bound journal from the stationery store on McKinney Avenue.
Thirty dollars. He'd looked at me on my birthday like he'd performed a miracle, and when I opened the box, and my face did the wrong thing for half a second, he'd said, "Most women would kill for that necklace, Callie.
" I wore the necklace to his mother's dinner that weekend and told everyone it was exactly what I wanted.
And now. This tin. This quiet, specific, page 7 of the friendship handbook, tin of the exact tea I liked.
The comparison was so absurd I almost laughed.
Bev walked in. Saw the tin. Saw my face. Her step faltered — just barely, just a fraction — and then she walked to her desk with an expression so aggressively neutral it was practically a confession.
"Morning," she said. Busying herself with her bag. Not looking at me.
Theo appeared behind her, laptop bag swinging. He spotted the tin immediately — Theo had radar for anything that resembled romantic intrigue.
"What's that? Is that a gift? Who left a gift?" His eyes went wide. "Was it Clay Blackwood? Please tell me it was Clay Blackwood. I will quit this job and walk into the sun if Clay Blackwood left you a present and you're not going to —"
"Nobody left me anything." I put the tin in my desk drawer and shut it. "It's just tea."
"Just tea," Theo repeated. Then he turned to Bev. “Bev, you’re the only one besides Savannah and Levi who have a key."
Bev's pen stopped moving. She didn’t look at us.
"Beverly Ann Kessler," Theo said, with the slow, delighted precision of a man assembling evidence. "Did you let Clay Blackwood into this office?"
She started writing again. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Your left eye is twitching. It twitches when you lie. It twitched when you told Savannah you hadn't eaten the last of the blueberry muffins."
Bev set her pen down. Looked at the ceiling.
Then, with the dignity of a woman who knew she'd been caught and had decided to go down swinging: "I may have run into him at Cooper's General on Friday.
And he may have asked — casually, very casually — what kind of tea you drank.
And I may have mentioned the brand." She picked her pen back up. "That's all."
"That is not all," Theo said. "That is the opening act. You gave a cowboy classified tea intelligence, Beverly."
"It's tea, Theo. Not state secrets."
"It's romantic tea. There's a difference."
I pointed at the Mercer files on his desk. "Work. Now."
Theo retreated, but the grin on his face could've powered the building. Bev returned to her filing with an air of injured innocence that fooled no one.
I opened my laptop and pulled up the morning's case files and did not think about the tin in my drawer. I did not think about a cowboy tracking down my tea brand through my office manager at a general store like some kind of Earl Grey espionage operation.
I opened the drawer three times before lunch.
The Maisie situation was reaching critical mass.
Every night. Every single night since the party. The same loop: Clay, the horses, the ranch, the pinky promise, the riding lessons, asking when we were going back, if we could go tomorrow, what about Tuesday because Clay said he'd teach me, a pinky promise is a real promise, Mommy.
She'd drawn a picture of him at school. A tall stick figure in a cowboy hat next to a brown horse next to a smaller stick figure with yellow scribbles for hair that was clearly Maisie. She'd labeled it in her wobbly sometimes backwards kindergarten letters: Me and Clay and the hors .
It was on the fridge. I didn't know how it got on the fridge. It just appeared there, held up by a magnet shaped like Texas, and every time I opened the refrigerator door, it looked at me with its crayon eyes and judged me.
By Thursday, I broke.
Not because of Clay. Because of Maisie — because my daughter had been promised something by someone who wasn't her father, and the promise was still standing, and every night that passed without it being kept was another night she'd learn that adults couldn't be trusted.
I refused to let Clay Blackwood become another broken promise in her collection because I was too nervous to make it happen.
I found the Blackwood Ranch number through the Copper Creek directory. A landline, because of course, this family had a landline. I dialed during my lunch break with the office door closed, expecting a voicemail or maybe one of the brothers.
A woman answered on the second ring. "Blackwood Ranch.” It was Louisa Blackwood.
"Hi — Mrs. Blackwood? This is Callie Monroe. We met at the —"
"Callie! Oh, honey, of course. How are you? How's that gorgeous girl of yours?"
The warmth hit me like a wall. Not performed warmth — the real kind, the kind that makes you feel like you've been wrapped in something soft.
"She's good. She's great, actually. That's sort of why I'm calling.
" I twisted the phone cord — they had a phone with a cord, this family was unbelievable — "Maisie hasn't stopped talking about the riding lessons Clay mentioned.
I know he was probably just being polite, and I don't want to impose, but she's been asking every night, and I thought maybe I should —"
Louisa laughed. The kind of laugh that made you feel like you'd said something delightful instead of something awkward.
"Being polite? Honey, Clay has been asking me every day this week if I've heard from you.
He's got a mare picked out and everything.
He's been unbearable." She said unbearable with a mother's pride so thick I could've spread it on toast. "You bring that baby out here Saturday morning.
We'll make a whole thing of it — riding lessons, the horses, I'll have lunch ready.
Clay will be over the moon, and frankly, so will I.
This house needs more little girl energy. "
I opened my mouth to set boundaries — just the lesson, we won't stay long, I don't want to be any trouble.
"Ten o'clock?" Louisa said. "I'll have lemonade."
"That's — yes. Ten o'clock. Thank you, Mrs. Blackwood."
"Louisa, honey. Or Lou. Only person who ever called me Mrs. Blackwood was the tax assessor, and that man had the personality of a filing cabinet."
I laughed. Actually laughed — the startled kind that escapes before you can catch it. This woman was impossible to resist, and I suspected she knew it, and I suspected she'd been weaponizing it against her children and their romantic interests for decades.
"Saturday at ten," I said. "Just for Maisie."
"Just for Maisie," Louisa agreed, and the smile in her voice said she wasn't buying that for a second.
Saturday. Blackwood Ranch. And my daughter was going to vibrate out of her skin.
“Mommy! Mommy! Is that the barn? Is that where the horses live? Can I touch them? Can I ride them? Where's Clay? Is Clay even here?"
"Maisie. Indoor voice."
"We're outside."
She had me there.
Clay was at the paddock when we pulled up.
Hat tipped back, sleeves rolled to the elbows, leaning on the fence with a lead rope over his shoulder.
He'd set up the paddock for a lesson — jumps removed, ground freshly raked, and a small, gentle-looking bay mare saddled and waiting with the patience of a horse who knew her assignment.
He'd chosen the horse carefully. I noticed that before anything else — before the smile, before the way his face changed when Maisie sprinted toward him. He'd thought about which horse she needed. He'd prepared.
"Hey, cowgirl!" He crouched — always crouched, always got low — and Maisie slammed into him like a small enthusiastic freight train. "Ready for your lesson?"
"I was born ready."
He laughed — surprised and delighted — and looked up at me over Maisie's head. "She gets that from you."
"She gets the volume from me. The confidence is all her."
"I doubt that."
I ignored the warmth in his voice and focused on the horse. "So what's the plan here, cowboy? Walk before we run?"
"This is Rosie. She's twelve, she's bombproof, and she once fell asleep during a thunderstorm. She's not going to do anything exciting."
"I like e-citing," Maisie said. Then, immediately: "Actually, can she gallop?"
"We're going to start with walking."
"Walking is for babies."
"Walking is for professionals. Even champion cowboys start with walking." He looked at me. And then he asked the question that cracked something open.