Chapter 21 #4
Before long, the buildings thinned out and gave way to rolling grassland dotted with cattle and horses.
The road curved gently, following the contour of the land, and Mia found herself mesmerized by the sheer openness of it all.
No traffic, no buildings blocking the sky, just grass and mountains and the occasional animal lifting its head placidly to watch them pass.
“The property’s about ten minutes from here,” Riley said. “Fifteen acres, like I told you. The barn needs work, but the bones are good. My dad and brother helped inspect it before we made the offer. Dad says the structure is solid. It just needs cosmetic updates and some repairs to the roof.”
“And the kennels?”
“We’ll have to build those from scratch. The materials are lined up, and—“ Riley paused, a complicated expression crossing her face. “And my brother’s going to help with the construction.”
“Ah yes, the mystery brother.” Mia had heard Riley mention him exactly twice in the three years they’d been friends in Seattle. Once when she’d had too much wine at Jazz’s birthday party, and once when she’d gotten a phone call that made her go pale and excuse herself for an hour. “Garrett, right?”
“That’s him.” Riley’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, just slightly. “He’s... complicated. But he’s good at building things. He needs a project right now, and he’s charging us the friends and family rates.”
Mia built a picture of him the way she’d built pictures of a thousand clients before meeting them, out of the few facts available and a great deal of professional guesswork. She filed it under a familiar heading: complicated brother who needs a project.
There would be brooding, probably. A certain amount of wounded mystery. Men described this way tended to arrive trailing a dark and interesting past like a good coat, and tended to know it, occasionally even wield it as a romantic weapon.
Before Mia could ask anything else, the truck crested a small hill. Riley pulled off onto a dirt road that wound between wooden fence posts weathered silver by sun and time.
At the end of the road sat a barn.
It was larger than Mia had imagined, red paint faded to the color of old brick, white trim peeling in places, a hayloft door hanging slightly crooked. Beyond it, a two-story house with a wraparound porch sat waiting, its windows reflecting the afternoon light like watchful eyes.
And beyond that…
Mia’s breath caught.
The mountains rose directly behind the property, so close she felt like she could reach out and touch them.
The afternoon sun had turned their peaks golden, and ribbons of snow traced the highest ridges like brush strokes on a canvas.
A hawk circled lazily in the space between earth and sky, riding thermals that Mia couldn’t see but could almost feel, shivers rippling over her skin in the warm, early summer evening.
“Told you,” Riley said quietly. “The view.”
“It’s...” Mia swallowed hard against something that felt dangerously like hope. “It’s something else.”
They climbed out of the truck, and Mia was immediately struck by the silence.
Not true silence, there was wind in the grass, birds calling somewhere in the distance, the tick of the cooling engine, but a silence so different from Seattle that it felt like a physical presence.
As if the land itself was breathing, waiting to see what they would do before the next exhale.
Jazz pulled in behind them, gravel crunching under tires, and Paige tumbled out of the truck’s passenger seat before the engine had fully stopped.
“Ohmigosh.” Paige’s phone was already raised, capturing everything. “This is going to post so well. The lighting! The barn! The freaking MOUNTAINS! Our followers are going to lose their absolute minds.”
“We don’t have followers yet,” Jazz pointed out, stretching her long legs after the drive and wincing at the crackle of her knees. “We don’t have animals yet. We don’t even have a website.”
“Details.” Paige waved a hand dismissively, already walking backward to get a better angle. “Vision, Jazz. You must have vision. One year from now, we’re going to look back at these photos and remember when Second Chance Ranch was just a dream.”
“One year from now, I’m going to look back at these photos and remember that I couldn’t feel my feet after that drive,” Jazz muttered, rolling out her ankles, but she was smiling.
Mia left them to their familial bickering and walked toward the barn, her sneakers crunching on gravel and then whispering through grass. The door stood slightly open, and she pushed it wider, the hinges protesting with a creak that echoed through the empty space.
Dust motes swirled in the shafts of light streaming through gaps in the roof, gaps that would need to be fixed before winter, she noted automatically, adding it to the list already forming in her head.
The space was enormous, easily big enough for everything they’d planned: the kennels, the cat room, the small animal area, intake and quarantine spaces, an office, maybe even a little retail section for supplies.
It smelled like hay and old wood and something she could only describe as possibility.
Maybe she could believe in this. Just a little. Just enough to take the next step.
Riley’s boots scuffed against the barn floor as she came up beside Mia. “The loft would be perfect for storage. And see those stalls along the back? Those can be converted to kennels pretty easily. Garrett thinks…“ She stopped herself.
“What does Garrett think?”
Riley sighed. “He thinks we can have the first phase operational within a month, if we work fast. The kennels, at least. The rest can come later.” She paused, looking around at the dusty space like she was seeing something else entirely.
“He’s good at figuring out how things fit together.
Always has been. Even when we were kids, he’d build these elaborate forts in the hayloft, all interconnected with rope bridges and secret compartments... ”
She trailed off, and Mia didn’t push. Whatever complicated history existed between Riley and her brother, it wasn’t her place to dig.
“The property next door belongs to a man named Harold Lancaster,” Riley said, clearly changing the subject, her face settling into something Mia noted was very intentionally neutral.
She pointed through a gap in the barn wall, where a line of trees partially obscured the neighboring land.
“Forty acres, right up against our property line. He’s...
Well. Complicated seems to be the word of the day. ”
“Complicated how?”
“His wife Eleanor died a few years ago. Cancer.” Riley’s voice went soft.
“They only had one son, and he moved away a long time ago. She was Harold’s whole world, her and that ranch.
Since Eleanor passed, he’s become a bit of a hermit.
I tried to talk to him about buying a few acres for expansion, paying fair market value, obviously, but he won’t even discuss it.
Got really upset at me just bringing up the subject, actually. ”
Mia looked in the direction Riley indicated.
Through the trees, she could barely make out another ranch house, smaller than theirs and sadder looking.
Paint that needed refreshing, a garden that had once been loved but was now overgrown with weeds, and a stable with its doors hanging open, empty.
In the far distance Mia could just make out a lone horse, and what looked to be a single donkey, and a broken swing hanging from a tree that had clearly grown without any supervision for a long time.
“Grief does strange things to people,” she said quietly.
“Yeah.” Riley was quiet for a moment. “It does.”
They spent the next two hours exploring every inch of the property as the afternoon light stretched long and golden across the grass.
Sloane emerged from the farm house, tablet already in hand, and immediately started cataloging everything that needed to be fixed, replaced, or demolished entirely.
Her spreadsheet had color coded columns indicating immediate, soon, and someday projects.
Thank goodness Mia had chosen her to run the operations and finances of the rescue.
Jazz photographed everything; the barn from different angles, the house’s wraparound porch, the view of the mountains, a particularly photogenic fence post. “For the website,” she kept saying, but Mia suspected she was also just falling in love with the light.
Paige filmed a “day one” video for social media, narrating their adventure to an audience of exactly zero.
“One day, this will be the first episode of our success story,” she said confidently, walking backward through the grass while filming herself.
She tripped over rocks twice but kept bounding around happily like nothing had happened.
And Mia... Mia made handwritten lists in a notebook. Because that was what she did when she was overwhelmed, when the feelings got too big and the future got too uncertain, she wrote things down. She organized and made the chaos into something she could manage, one bullet point at a time.
Her list grew steadily. Supplies needed for renovation.
Permits to apply for. Local businesses to contact about partnerships: the feed store, the hardware shop, maybe even the church if the pastor was open to putting up flyers for the congregation.
Potential foster families to recruit for the animals.
Rescue organizations to coordinate with for intake.
A timeline for the website. A budget for the first six months.
By the time the sun started sinking behind the mountains, painting everything in shades of orange and pink and deep, brooding purple, Mia had filled six pages of her notebook with her small, precise handwriting.