Chapter 23
Something was wrong. Wyatt knew it the second Meghan pulled into the staging area on Saturday morning.
She parked in her usual spot, got out of the car, and grabbed her bag. Normal movements. Normal routine. But something in the way she carried herself had changed—tighter, more contained, like she was holding her edges in place through effort alone.
She walked to the corral fence, where he was checking the chestnut’s front shoes. “Morning.”
“Morning.”
She set up at the tailgate. Notebook, pen, coffee she’d brought from somewhere that wasn’t the diner. She opened the notebook and started writing, and Wyatt went back to the chestnut’s feet, and the morning began the way every morning had begun for the past three weeks.
Except it hadn’t because Meghan wasn’t fully here.
Her body was—sitting on the tailgate, pen in hand, notebook open—but the rest of her was somewhere he couldn’t reach. She stared at the notebook without writing. She looked up when a trailer pulled in, but her eyes didn’t track the way they usually did.
She was going through the motions. He’d seen horses do that. Stand in the crossties and move through every step of the shoeing process—lift the foot, hold still, shift weight—while their minds were three fields away, running from something nobody else could see.
The body cooperated. The animal inside was gone.
He didn’t ask. He wanted to. The urge stayed with him all morning, pressing against his ribs like a breath he couldn’t let out.
Something had happened. Between the porch and the peaches and the tailgate where she’d said yes to the fireworks and this morning, something had shifted.
But asking was pushing, and pushing was the one thing he’d promised himself—and her, though he’d never said it out loud—that he wouldn’t do.
So he worked. He checked the chestnut’s shoes and walked her around the lot.
She passed the trash can without flinching.
He talked to Curtis about the parade spacing, confirmed the Percheron’s position in the lineup with Dan, and inspected the reenactment group’s horses while making notes on a clipboard that still had Pop’s handwriting on the back page.
Meghan worked too. She met with the deputies about their uniforms. Measured a reenactment rider’s hat brim. Talked to Curtis’s wife about pin curls, her voice professional and warm and exactly right.
Nobody except Wyatt would have known the warmth took effort today.
He watched her the way he watched a horse he was worried about—keeping her in his peripheral vision while he did his own work.
Noticing when she paused too long over her notebook.
Noticing when she looked down Main Street toward the salon with an expression he couldn’t read from thirty feet away.
Noticing that she didn’t make a single joke all morning.
Didn’t smile. Didn’t do any of the small, easy things that made being around her feel like breathing.
The morning passed. The deputies loaded their horses. Curtis took the chestnut home. Dan walked the Percheron onto the trailer. The lot emptied out.
Meghan was still on the tailgate. Notebook closed now, bag beside her, hands flat on the metal surface on either side of her legs. She was looking at the tree line behind the church.
Wyatt set his tools in the truck bed and closed the tailgate on his side. Then he walked around to where she sat and leaned against the fender. Close enough to talk, but far enough that the space between them was hers to close or keep.
The lot was quiet. A breeze moved through the trees behind the church, and the leaves made a sound like paper shuffling. The sun was high, the shadows short, the day already turning hot.
Meghan didn’t look at him. Finally, she took a breath and spoke.
“Thank you for not asking.”
He nodded. He’d been right. Something had happened, and she knew he knew, and the fact that he hadn’t asked was the thing she needed to acknowledge before either of them could move forward.
“I figured you’d tell me when you were ready,” he said.
She looked at him then. Her eyes were tired. The kind of tired that came from a night of not sleeping, or sleeping without resting, or lying in the dark with a sentence that wouldn’t come apart no matter how many times you turned it over.
“I might not be ready for a while,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
He said it and meant it and didn’t add anything else. No reassurance. No follow-up. No gentle probing disguised as concern. Just the truth.
She could take as long as she needed. He would be here. Not because he was patient by nature, though he was, but because she was worth waiting for, and the waiting didn’t feel like a sacrifice. It was just what you did when you cared about someone who was carrying something difficult.
You stood nearby. You kept your hands visible. You let them reach out when they were ready, not when you thought they should be.
Meghan looked at him for a long moment. Then she did something he hadn’t expected. She reached over and put her hand on his forearm. Just for a second, her palm flat against his skin, her fingers resting near the inside of his wrist where the tan line from his work gloves ended.
The touch was brief, deliberate, warm. Then it was gone.
“I’ll see you Monday,” she said.
“Monday.”
She slid off the tailgate, picked up her bag, and walked to her car. Wyatt watched her go. She moved slowly across the gravel, her stride missing the quick certainty it usually carried. At her car, she opened the door, tossed her bag in, and paused with one hand on the roof.
She shot a look at him over her shoulder. It lasted two seconds and said more than the whole morning of silence had. Then she got in and drove away.
Wyatt stood beside the truck and looked at the spot on his forearm where her hand had been. The skin was warm, but it was July in East Tennessee, so that didn’t mean anything.
Except it meant everything.
He stood there in the empty lot behind the Baptist church and let it mean everything for a full sixty seconds. Then he picked up his clipboard and got back to work.
Monday. He’d be here Monday. He’d be here every day she needed him to be.