Chapter 35
The morning was cool for July.
It wouldn’t last. By noon, the heat would be back, pressing down on the valley the way it pressed down every day in July. But for now, the air was good. Clean. The kind of morning Pop used to call a gift you didn’t earn.
He’d opened the screen door and taken the coffees from her before she dropped them. “Sierra had cinnamon rolls,” she’d said, and then she’d walked past him into the kitchen.
She was still in the kitchen now. He could hear her from the barn—the cabinets opening and closing, water running, the clink of Pop’s mugs being set on the counter.
She was washing the breakfast dishes. He hadn’t asked her to.
She’d just stood from the table, carried the plates to the sink, and turned on the water.
The flooring sample was still on the table. Oak, warm-toned. He’d ordered it two weeks ago, and the full shipment was sitting in three boxes in the back room, waiting for a weekend when he had time to pull up the old linoleum and lay the new floor.
Meghan hadn’t asked about the boxes. She’d seen them. She’d said nothing. She was letting him do it at his own pace, the way she let him do everything—without pressure, without a timeline, without the expectation that change had to happen on anybody’s schedule but his.
Wyatt picked up the rasp from the workbench and ran his thumb along the edge. Still sharp. He’d dressed it last week. The handle was dark with decades of use, the wood worn smooth in the shape of Pop’s grip. Wyatt’s hand fit it differently.
Wider palm. Longer fingers. But the tool didn’t care whose hand held it. It just did the work.
The tools were on the wall. All of them, in their places, on the pegs Pop had drilled. Wyatt looked at them the way he looked at them every morning now—not with grief, not with nostalgia, just with the quiet acknowledgment that they were here and he was here and the work was continuing.
That was what Pop would have wanted. The work, continuing.
Shoes shaped on the anvil. Hooves trimmed in the crossties. Invoices written on the clipboard. The same route driven, the same clients served, the same trade practiced with care and patience and the same refusal to rush.
The work was the legacy. Everything else was where you kept the tools.
Wyatt walked out of the barn into the morning.
The pasture was bright with early sun, the grass still carrying dew that would burn off by eight.
Junebug was at the fence. The old horse had an internal clock more reliable than anything battery-powered, and 6:30 was the time Wyatt checked his feet. Junebug was nothing if not punctual.
“Morning,” Wyatt said.
Junebug bobbed his head. Whether it was a greeting or a demand for breakfast was anybody’s guess. Wyatt chose to believe it was both.
He ducked through the fence and crouched beside the old horse. Ran his hand down the left foreleg, squeezed the tendon, and Junebug lifted the hoof. The shoe was tight. The hoof wall was clean and even. Twenty-two years old, and Junebug’s feet were still good. Some things lasted.
Wyatt checked all four. Took his time. Junebug stood patiently, shifting his weight when asked, lifting each foot like he was doing Wyatt a favor.
In a sense, he was. This horse had been Pop’s partner for sixteen years.
He had carried Pop on trail rides and stood in crossties while Pop worked and grazed in this pasture every morning of his life since he was six years old.
He was the last living connection to the man who had built this barn and driven that truck and hung those tools on the wall.
Wyatt set the last foot down and straightened. He rested a hand on Junebug’s shoulder. The old horse turned his head and looked at him—one dark eye, calm and deep and entirely unimpressed.
“You’re good,” Wyatt told him.
Junebug went back to the fence. Wyatt ducked through and walked toward the house.
Through the screen door, he could see Meghan at the counter. She’d finished the dishes and was leaning against the sink, looking out the window at the pasture. The same window. The same view. Pop’s spot.
She held a mug in both hands—Pop’s mug, the blue one from the cabinet above the sink—and morning light from the window fell across her face.
She didn’t know he was watching. She was just standing there, looking at the horses, drinking coffee from a dead man’s mug in a kitchen with a floor that was about to change.
Wyatt stood in the yard and looked at her through the screen. The truck was in the drive. HAYNES FARRIERY on the door, the letters he still hadn’t repainted.
He’d get to it. Maybe this fall, when the schedule slowed down and the mornings got cool enough to work outside without sweating through his shirt. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe the letters would stay the way they were.
Pop’s name, Pop’s truck, Wyatt’s hands on the wheel. Both of them in the same vehicle, driving the same roads.
The bay mare had come out of the barn. She was standing in the pasture, twenty feet from Junebug, grazing. Not at the fence. Not close. But out in the open, making her own decision about where she wanted to be.
The barn was behind him, the tools on the wall, the workbench with its worn surface. The crossties, the stalls, the aisle where he’d learned to shoe a horse from a man who explained everything.
The kitchen was in front of him. Meghan at the window, coffee in Pop’s mug. The flooring sample on the table, the boxes in the back room, the old linoleum that would come up this weekend, or the next, or whenever he was ready.
He was almost ready.
Wyatt pushed open the screen door. Meghan turned from the window and smiled at him—easy, unhurried, the smile of a woman standing in a kitchen she had walked into at 5:45 in the morning because she wanted to be there.
“Junebug’s good,” Wyatt said.
“I saw you checking him.” She nodded toward the window. “He’s very patient with you.”
“He thinks he’s doing me a favor.”
“He is.”
Wyatt poured himself coffee and stood beside her at the counter. Their shoulders touched. Through the window, Junebug grazed at the fence, the bay mare stood in the pasture, and the mountains were sharp and blue against the morning sky.
The work was continuing, the tools were on the wall. The woman was in the kitchen, the truck was in the yard.
Wyatt drank his coffee and looked at the view and let the morning be what it was.