Chapter 13
The chestnut didn’t want to walk past the trash can.
It was a regular trash can. Green. Plastic lid.
Bolted to a post at the edge of the lot behind the Baptist church, where it had been sitting for as long as anyone in Hope Hollow could remember.
But the chestnut had decided, sometime between yesterday afternoon and this morning, that it was a threat.
Wyatt held the lead and waited. The mare stood fifteen feet away from it, every muscle locked, ears pinned forward so hard they nearly touched. Her nostrils flared with each breath. The whites of her eyes showed at the edges.
She wasn’t going to bolt. She’d moved past that in the first week. But she wasn’t going to walk past the trash can, either.
She’d made her decision. Wyatt’s job was to wait her out.
He let the lead hang slack. Didn’t pull. Didn’t cluck. Didn’t shift his weight or angle his body or do any of the dozen things a less patient handler might try to nudge her forward. He just stood there, boots in the gravel, and let the mare work it out.
This was day nine. Nine mornings of driving to the lot at seven, unloading the chestnut from Curtis’s trailer, and walking her through the space. The first few days, they’d barely made it past the corral gate. Every new sound stopped her cold—a car door, a bird, a flag popping on its pole.
By day five, she was walking the full lot.
By day seven, she could tolerate the setup crews on the far side of the parking area, as long as nobody dropped anything metal.
The trash can was new. Curtis had moved it closer to the walking path yesterday as part of the desensitization plan, and the chestnut had noticed immediately. She’d walked past it once, tight and fast, her body curving away from it as though the lid might open and swallow her whole.
Today, she refused to go near it.
Progress wasn’t a straight line. Pop had said that about a hundred different things, and every single time, he’d been right.
Wyatt waited. A minute passed. Two. The mare’s breathing slowed. Her ears, still forward, softened a fraction. She dropped her head an inch. Then another.
Wyatt took one step. Not toward the trash can. Just forward, into the slack of the lead, giving her room to follow or stay.
She stayed. He stopped. Waited again. A car pulled into the lot behind him.
He didn’t turn around. He knew the sound of Meghan’s engine by now—a fact he’d noticed three days ago and filed under things he was not going to examine.
The car door closed. Footsteps on gravel.
Meghan didn’t call out. She’d learned, over the past week of mornings at the staging area, that talking to Wyatt while he was working a horse was like talking to a surgeon mid-incision.
You waited until he stepped back. She’d figured that out without him having to explain it, which was one of about fifteen things she’d figured out on her own.
The chestnut took a step. Small, tentative. Her front hoof landed six inches ahead of where it had been, and she stopped again, neck stretched toward the trash can like she was daring it to move.
Wyatt exhaled. Took another step. The mare followed this time. Twelve feet from the trash can. Ten. Eight.
She stopped again, but the tension in her body had changed. Less fear now. More suspicion. She was negotiating. He let her.
Another minute passed. Then she walked forward on her own, passed the trash can at a distance of about four feet, and kept going. Her stride loosened on the other side. She blew out a long breath through her nose. The worst was over.
Wyatt walked her the rest of the loop around the lot, back to the corral, and unclipped the lead. The mare moved into the pen and dropped her head to the water trough.
“That took a while,” Meghan said.
She was sitting on the tailgate of his truck. Her canvas bag was beside her, notebook on her lap, a coffee cup from the diner balanced on the wheel well. She’d been watching the whole thing.
“Twelve minutes.” Wyatt coiled the lead rope and draped it over the corral fence. “Yesterday, it took twenty.”
“So she’s getting better.”
“She’s getting braver.” He walked to the truck and leaned against the fender beside the tailgate. “That’s not the same thing, but it’s close.”
Meghan held out the coffee cup. “I brought you one. It’s probably cold by now.”
It was lukewarm. He drank it anyway. She’d remembered how he took it—black, no sugar. He didn’t ask when she’d learned that. Some things you were better off not tracking too closely.
The morning was already warm. The mountains behind the church were soft with haze, the kind of early-summer blur that meant the afternoon would be brutal.
Two deputies were in the far corner of the lot, working with their horses on the parade spacing Richard had mapped out.
Curtis was nowhere in sight, which meant he was either late or had given up on mornings entirely.
“You’re good with her,” Meghan said.
She was looking at the chestnut, who was standing calmly at the water trough, her earlier standoff with the trash can apparently forgotten.
“I’m patient with her. That’s different from good.”
“Is it?”
Wyatt considered that. Pop would have had an answer. Pop had answers for everything when it came to horses. Wyatt was still borrowing most of them.
“Good means you know what to do,” he said. “Patient just means you know what not to do.”
Meghan looked at him then. She was paying attention. Listening patiently as she always did.
“I can’t train the fear out of her,” he said. “I can just keep showing up and being the same thing every morning until she decides I’m not a threat.”
Meghan’s pen rested on the open notebook, but she wasn’t writing. “Is that what your grandfather taught you?” she asked.
He looked at her. She was watching him the way she’d been watching the chestnut—steady, unhurried, waiting to see what he would do next.
“Most of it,” he said. “He had this way of reading a horse just by watching it stand. How it carried its weight. Which foot it rested. Where the tension was. He used to say they’d tell you everything if you shut up long enough.”
“Smart man.”
“He was.” Wyatt took another sip of the lukewarm coffee. “He died two years ago. Heart attack. I was shoeing a horse in Sevierville when my mother called.”
She already knew. He’d told her in the salon that first evening, and again on Main Street. But the details—the Sevierville farm, his mother’s voice on the phone—those he hadn’t said out loud before.
The fact of it was simple. The weight of it never changed.
Meghan didn’t say she was sorry. She shifted on the tailgate, turning toward him slightly, and said, “Tell me about him.”
Four words.
They opened something Wyatt had not expected to open on a Tuesday morning in a parking lot behind a church.
He told her. Not everything. Not the hospital, or the phone call, or the three days after when he had done nothing but feed the horses and sit on the porch.
He told her the other things. The things that made Pop who he was before the ending turned him into a story people told with soft voices.
He told her about the county fairs. Pop in his leather apron, color-coded tags on every set of shoes, working twelve horses in a day and stopping for exactly one lunch break.
He told her about the rules. Every tool in its place, every invoice written by hand, every client greeted by name and by their horse’s name, because the horse was the client, not the person.
He told her about the truck. How Pop had bought it new—the only new vehicle he’d ever owned—and driven it to every call for the next nineteen years without once considering a replacement.
How the seat had molded to Pop’s shape, and how Wyatt could still feel the difference when he sat in it, the leather giving in places that didn’t quite match his frame.
He told her about Junebug. How Pop had found the roan at an auction, underfed and skittish, and spent a full year bringing him back.
How the two of them used to ride the ridge trail behind the property on Sunday mornings, Pop in the saddle and Junebug picking through the rocks like he knew his job was to keep the old man safe.
Meghan listened. She didn’t interrupt. Didn’t redirect. Didn’t offer commentary or comparisons. She sat on the tailgate with her coffee and her notebook and let him talk. When he paused, she waited. When he continued, she stayed.
At some point, he realized he’d been talking for a long time. Longer than he’d talked to anyone about Pop since the funeral, when talking about him had been required rather than chosen.
This was different. Nobody was asking him to eulogize or summarize or wrap it up with something comforting. Meghan had said tell me about him, and he had, and she’d treated the telling like it mattered.
He stopped.
Not because he’d run out of things to say, but because the parking lot had filled in around them and the morning was moving on. The deputies were loading their horses. A setup crew had arrived and was unloading folding tables from a van.
“He sounds like someone I would have liked,” Meghan said.
“He would have liked you.”
The words came out before he could stop them. Wyatt looked down at his coffee cup. Empty.
Meghan looked at hers. “Why?” she asked.
He could have deflected. Changed the subject. Made a joke about Pop liking anyone who tolerated his stories about hoof angles and county fairs. But Meghan had sat on a tailgate for twenty minutes and listened to him talk about a dead man she’d never met. The least he owed her was the truth.
“Because you pay attention,” he said. “He respected that more than anything.”
She held his gaze for one second. Then two. Something moved through her expression. Soft and startled, like she hadn’t expected the answer to be important, but it was.
Then she looked down at her notebook, uncapped her pen, and said, “I need to check the bridle measurements on the Percheron before Dan leaves.”
“I’ll be here.”
She slid off the tailgate, picked up her bag, and walked across the lot toward the corral where Dan was brushing the big mare down.
Wyatt watched her go. She moved easily through the gravel and the noise and the scattered activity of the morning, like she belonged there now.
Like the lot had made room for her without asking his permission.
He pushed off the fender and went to check on the chestnut. The mare was calm. Head low, one hip cocked, eyes half-closed. The trash can sat four feet away from her, harmless and green and no longer the enemy.
Nine days. That was all it had taken for the trash can to stop being a threat. Wyatt looked across the lot at Meghan, standing beside the Percheron with her notebook open and the sun on her hair. He wondered how long it would take him to stop pretending he wasn’t falling in love with her.
Longer than nine days. He was fairly sure about that.