Chapter 5
Clay
The spark kept catching.
Nights at the house, after everyone had gone to bed, I found myself at the kitchen table with my laptop open — not watching highlights or checking circuit standings, which had been my nighttime ritual for years.
I was studying bloodlines. Quarter horse registries.
Performance pedigrees. I pulled up AQHA records and cross-referenced dams and sires, looking for the genetic intersections where cutting instinct met athleticism met temperament.
I fell down a rabbit hole about the King Ranch, the Four Sixes, the legendary programs that had turned horse breeding into legacy.
During the day, I couldn't shut up.
I'd be at the paddock fence with Jack, pointing at yearlings, talking too fast, seeing things I didn't know I could see until I started looking.
The bay colt who moved like a reiner. Penny's filly with cow sense coming from her dam's side.
I'd catch myself mid-sentence — three minutes deep in a monologue about broodmare bands — and Jack would be standing there with his arms folded, nodding, a look on his face like he was watching something click into place and had the good sense not to interrupt it.
It felt like hunger. That's the closest I could get.
The same single-minded need that had driven me into chutes for twelve years — the need to be good at something, to build something, to prove I was more than just a body on the back of a bull — had found a new direction and was running flat out.
I'd lie in bed at night and see paddock configurations instead of arena layouts.
I'd wake up thinking about bloodlines instead of draw sheets.
But then the doubt crept in.
Is this real? Or am I just grasping at the first thing that isn't bull riding?
I'd been Clay Blackwood, Bull Rider, for so long that wanting something new felt like betrayal. Like I was replacing one identity with another without stopping to figure out if the new one fit or if I was just afraid of the empty space between them.
I closed the laptop. I'd sit with it.
But even as I told myself to slow down, my brain was already sorting yearlings by potential in my sleep.
Dad and I rode the north fence line on Thursday morning.
This was a thing we'd done since I could sit a horse — father and son, checking fence, saying little.
The rhythm of it hadn't changed in twenty years.
Two horses walking side by side, the creak of leather, the morning air carrying cedar and grass, and the distant lowing of cattle.
It was the closest thing to church I'd ever known.
We fixed a section of wire that had come loose near the creek crossing. Worked together without speaking — him holding the tension, me driving the staples. Our hands knew this language even when our mouths didn't.
When we mounted back up, Dad told a story.
"First two years after your grandfather died nearly broke me," he said, eyes on the horizon, voice unhurried.
"Not the work — I knew how to work. But the ranch was his, run his way, and his way had been fueled by whiskey and meanness.
I had to tear out everything he'd built in my head before I could build anything real with my hands. "
He adjusted his reins. The leather creaked.
"I didn't have much. Had the land, had a handful of cattle, had more stubbornness than sense. But I had a picture in my mind of what this place could be if somebody loved it right. So I just worked it. Day by day. Fence by fence."
His voice shifted then — went warmer the way it always did when he got to this part.
"Then your momma came home. Finished her accounting degree, smart as hell, could've gone anywhere.
But she came back." The corner of his mouth lifted — the expression he wore whenever he talked about Momma, like she was still the best surprise of his life thirty-five years in.
"She looked at this half-broke ranch and she looked at me and she said, 'I believe in what you're building, Owen Blackwood.
' And she meant it. That woman loved me like it was a decision she made every morning and never once wavered on. "
He was quiet for a beat.
"When the oil company came along with their offer, that changed everything.
Finally had some real money to work with.
But the money didn't build this ranch — it just gave us room to breathe.
Your momma and I built it. Day by day. Together.
Because we had a vision for this family and we never let go of it. "
He looked at me then. Brief, direct. Then he reached across the space between our horses and squeezed the back of my neck — the same gesture, the same warm hand, the same shorthand he'd been using since I was a kid.
"The next thing doesn't have to look like the last thing, son."
He turned his horse toward the south section, and I followed.
We rode for another hour without saying a word.
But something had loosened — the same knot that had been tightening since Fort Worth, since the buckle, since the question I couldn't stop asking.
Dad hadn't answered it. He'd done something better.
He'd told me I was allowed to find my own answer.
I'd also been finding reasons to go into town.
Feed at Cooper's General — a trip that should've taken twenty minutes, stretched to an hour because I stopped at the hardware store for bolts I didn't need, then walked the length of Main Street like a man with nowhere to be.
Which I was. The only place I wanted to be was wherever Callie Monroe happened to be, and on a Saturday morning in Copper Creek, that could be anywhere.
I wasn't expecting to see her through the office window.
Tate & Hollis was closed Saturdays — lights off, blinds down, the CLOSED sign hanging crooked in the door the way it always did.
Except one light was on. The back office.
And through the gap in the blinds, I could see her — hair tucked behind one ear, reading glasses on, bent over paperwork at her desk like it was a Tuesday morning and not a weekend.
Alone. No Bev. No Theo. Just Callie in an empty office with a mug of tea and whatever she was using to fill the hours while her daughter was somewhere else.
I stood on the sidewalk for a long moment. The smart move was to keep walking. She was working. She hadn't invited me. She didn't need a cowboy knocking on the door of her closed office because he'd happened to glance through a window.
I knocked on the door.
She looked up. The reading glasses caught the light. Her expression shifted — surprise, then something careful sliding into place over whatever had been there a second before.
She came to the door. Unlocked it. Opened it halfway.
"Clay." Not unfriendly. But guarded in a way she hadn't been at the riding lesson. "The office is closed."
"I can see that." I nodded at the dark sign. "You always work in closed offices by yourself on Saturdays?"
Something flickered across her face — the briefest slip in the composure before she sealed it. "I had paperwork to catch up on."
"On a Saturday."
"Paperwork doesn't know what day it is."
She stood in the gap, one hand on the door, and I could see it now — up close, without the buffer of Bev and Theo and office noise.
The shadows under her eyes. The stillness in her face.
The way she was holding herself like one wrong word would unravel something she'd spent all morning keeping wound tight.
"How's Maisie after the riding lesson?" I asked. "She recovering from the horse withdrawal?"
The corner of her mouth twitched, but the smile didn't reach her eyes. "She's drawn fourteen pictures of Rosie this week. Fourteen. I'm running out of fridge magnets."
"That's dedication."
"That's obsession." But her voice was thinner than it should've been.
I didn't push into the office. Didn't invite myself in. I stayed where I was and waited, because I was learning that Callie Monroe didn't open doors when you knocked — she opened them when she was ready, and the only thing you could do was stand there and not leave.
"Walk with me?" I said. "I'm parked down the block. You look like you could use some air that isn't this office."
She hesitated. Looked back at the paperwork on her desk. Then at me. Then at the empty office behind her — the stillness of it, the alone of it, the weight of a room that was supposed to have people in it.
"Sure," she said. "I could use the air."
Callie walked beside me with her hands buried in her jacket pockets, chin down, and the distance between the office version of her and this version — out here, in the light, without an audience — was the distance between a woman performing okay and a woman barely holding it together.
I leaned against the truck. She stopped a few feet away, squinting at the sky like she was deciding something.
"Maisie's with her father this weekend," she said. Just like that. No preamble. "Every second weekend. It's the custody arrangement."
I didn't say anything. Just waited.
"I dropped her off last night." Her jaw tightened.
"She didn't want to go. She told me she didn't want to go, and I packed her bag and drove her there and handed her over because that's what the agreement says, and he took her like —" She stopped.
Swallowed. "She was so quiet, Clay. The whole drive.
She just sat in the back holding her horse and not talking. "
Her voice was steady, but her hands weren't. She'd shoved them deeper into her pockets.
"And now I'm sitting in that office pretending to work because the cottage is too quiet and if I stay there I'll lose my mind.
" She looked at me. Her eyes were dry, but the helplessness behind them — the naked, furious helplessness of a mother who'd just handed her child to a man she didn't trust — hit me like a fist. "Sorry.
You came in for a friendly chat, and I'm —"
"Don't apologize."
"I'm fine."