Chapter 7
The first walk-through was a disaster.
Not for the sheriff’s horses. The four quarter horses moved down Main Street like they owned it—heads level, ears forward, stepping past the bunting and sandwich boards and the kid who dropped a skateboard on the sidewalk without so much as a flicker.
They’d done this before.
The Percheron was fine too. Dan walked her on a loose lead, and she plodded along with the heavy, measured gait of a horse who considered noise and crowds to be someone else’s problem. A woman came out of the pharmacy and let the screen door slam, and the Percheron didn’t even blink.
The chestnut was the problem. She made it two blocks. Past the post office. Past the bench outside the barbershop where Cal sat with a newspaper he wasn’t reading.
Then a setup crew on the far side of the street dropped a metal pole on the sidewalk, and the chestnut went sideways. Not a bolt. She didn’t run. But she planted her front feet and swung her hindquarters into the street, pulling the lead tight, head high, eyes showing white.
Her owner—Curtis, the reenactment man—held on and talked her down. It took two minutes. Two minutes of standing in the middle of Main Street while the horse trembled, Curtis murmured, and traffic stacked up behind them. By the time she settled, Wyatt had already decided the walk was over for her.
“Take her back to the lot,” he told Curtis. “We’ll try again tomorrow. Shorter route.”
Curtis didn’t argue. He turned the chestnut around and walked her back toward the church, and Wyatt watched the tension drain out of the mare with every step she took away from Main Street.
By the time she passed the post office, her head was lower. Her stride had loosened. Getting better took longer than getting worse.
That was the thing about fear. You could build trust for a week and lose it in a single dropped pole.
The rest of the group continued to the town square, where the parade would make its turn. Wyatt walked alongside the Percheron, keeping an eye on the sheriff’s horses ahead and making notes he didn’t bother writing down.
The route was fine. Flat, wide enough for the carriage, no tight corners. The biggest variable would be the crowd noise on the actual day, but that was weeks away.
They reached the square and stopped to let the horses rest. The deputies loosened their leads. Dan fed the Percheron a piece of carrot from his shirt pocket.
That was when Wyatt saw Meghan. She was sitting on the bench outside the library with her notebook.
She’d been there when they passed, he realized.
He’d been so focused on the chestnut that he hadn’t noticed her.
But she’d been sitting in the shade with her canvas bag, a pen in one hand, and a coffee cup balanced on the armrest beside her.
She had sunglasses pushed up on her head, and when she looked toward him, the simple fact of being seen by her did something inconvenient to his chest.
She stood and walked over. Not to him. To the deputies. Of course.
She opened her notebook and started confirming collar sizes, hat placement, whether the reenactment riders would be wearing their own hair or wigs. Professional. Focused. The same easy authority she had in the salon, translated to a sidewalk in the sun.
Wyatt busied himself checking the Percheron’s shoes. He’d just reset them. They were fine. But it gave him something to do with his hands while Meghan worked.
He crouched and picked up the front left. The shoe was solid. The clinches were tight. He set the foot down and moved to the right.
“Is she always this calm?”
Meghan had appeared beside him. He hadn’t heard her cross the square. She stood a few feet away, looking at the Percheron, who had one hip cocked and her eyes half-closed in the sun.
“She’s done this a long time,” Wyatt said. He stood and rested one hand on the mare’s shoulder. “Sixteen years of carriage work. Every noise, every crowd, she’s already heard it.”
“And the other one?”
“The chestnut needs more time. We’ll keep bringing her out. Shorter distances, lower stakes. She’ll get there or she won’t.”
“You sound like you’re not sure.”
“I’m not.” He looked down the street toward the church, where Curtis and the chestnut had disappeared around the corner. “Some horses don’t take to it. You can train the response, but you can’t train the fear out. All you can do is give them enough good experiences that the fear gets quieter.”
Meghan was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Walk with me? I need to check the staging marks Richard put down for the float lineup.”
He shouldn’t have liked the sound of that as much as he did. “Sure.”
The deputies stayed in the square with the horses.
Dan found a bench and sat down with the Percheron standing beside him like a very large dog.
Wyatt and Meghan walked the parade route in the opposite direction, past the storefronts, banners, and chalk marks Richard had drawn on the curb at twenty-foot intervals.
The town was awake around them. The hardware store had its door propped open, and a radio played somewhere inside. A woman watered flower boxes outside the gift shop. Two kids ran across the courthouse lawn. The smell of coffee drifted from the diner every time the door swung open.
Meghan walked with her notebook in one hand, making marks as they passed each staging point.
She didn’t fill the silence. That was the thing he kept noticing.
She let quiet be quiet, and it made the space between them feel like something they were sharing instead of something one of them needed to fix.
“My grandfather used to shoe the horses for the county fair every year,” Wyatt said.
He hadn’t planned to say it. The words came out anyway. That happened when he was comfortable.
Meghan looked at him. Waited.
“Over in Maryville,” he said. “Draft horses, mostly. Clydesdales, Percherons, a couple of Belgians. He’d start weeks ahead, making shoes, sizing them. He had a whole system. Color-coded tags on each set so he’d know which horse they belonged to.”
“How many horses?”
“Twelve, some years. Fifteen.” Wyatt watched the sidewalk in front of him. “The fair was a big deal for him. He talked about it all summer.”
“When did he stop?”
“The summer before he died.” Wyatt kept his eyes on the street. “He got sick that spring. By the time the fair came around, he couldn’t make the drive. I offered to do it for him. Take his kit, use his tags, run it the way he would have.”
Meghan didn’t ask the question most people would have asked. She waited for the answer he was ready to give.
“He said no,” Wyatt said. “Said if he couldn’t do it himself, he didn’t want it done.”
He could still hear Pop’s voice. Gruff. Tired. Final in a way Wyatt hadn’t understood at the time.
“I thought he was being stubborn,” Wyatt said. “He was. But he was also right. It was his thing, not mine.”
They passed the diner. Through the window, Wyatt could see Betsy behind the counter and Cal on his stool. Same people, same places. The town turning like a wheel that had been spinning for a hundred years.
“He had a heart attack that November,” Wyatt said.
Meghan was looking at him now. Not with sympathy.
He knew that face—the softened eyes, the tilted head, the weight people put into your grief because they didn’t know where else to set their hands.
This wasn’t that. She was just looking at him.
Paying attention. Taking in what he was saying like it mattered.
“What was his name?” she asked.
The question got to him more than it should have. Not How old was he? Not Were you close? Not I’m so sorry. His name.
“Hal,” Wyatt said.
Meghan nodded. She didn’t say anything else. She just let the name sit in the warm air between them.
They reached the end of the parade route, where Main Street met the road to the lake. Richard’s chalk marks stopped there. Beyond that, the town gave way to open road, trees, and the blue-green line of the mountains.
Meghan made a final note and closed her notebook. “I still need to check the fit on that decorative bridle against the Percheron’s headstall. Dan said he doesn’t have one close to the right size.”
“I might,” Wyatt said. “I’ve got tack at the farm that could work. It’s up past the Jennings place—gravel road at the end.”
Meghan nodded and wrote something in her notebook. For a moment, neither of them moved. She looked up at the mountains, then back at him.
“Hal would’ve liked this parade,” she said.
Wyatt didn’t answer right away. He looked down the street behind them—the banners, the storefronts, the square where the horses waited in the sun.
A town getting ready for something. The kind of thing Pop had loved, not because he cared about parades, but because he liked being useful.
Liked showing up with his tools and doing the thing only he could do.
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “He would have.”
They started back toward the square. The sidewalk narrowed in front of the hardware store, where a stack of planters had been arranged outside the door.
Meghan shifted closer to let a woman pass with a watering can.
Her arm brushed his. Just below the elbow.
Accidental, a half second of contact, cotton against skin, warm from the sun.
Neither of them moved away immediately. The moment was so small it should have been nothing. Wyatt felt it anyway. Then the woman passed, the sidewalk opened again, and the space returned between them.
Meghan glanced down at her notebook, but he saw the color touch her cheeks. He looked straight ahead like a gentleman and pretended he hadn’t.
At the square, Meghan split off to talk to Dan about the carriage decorations. Wyatt went back to the Percheron, checked the shoes he’d already checked twice, and loaded his kit into the truck.
He sat in the cab for a minute before starting the engine. Through the windshield, he could see Meghan on the bench, notebook open, writing something. Sunlight touched her face. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with her pen hand and kept working.
He wanted to look longer. That was exactly why he started the truck.
As he pulled away from the curb, he kept his eyes on the road. He didn’t look in the rearview mirror. Some things you didn’t rush, even when you wanted to.