Five
CASS
Sleep had become a stranger who visited but never stayed.
Three in the morning found me in the barn, checking horses because I couldn’t stand to lie in bed for another minute.
The insomnia had been getting worse since Walker arrived—too many thoughts chasing each other, too many questions I didn’t know how to answer.
The barn at this hour was the closest thing I had to a church.
The horses breathing in the dark, the creak of old wood settling, the smell of hay and leather and molasses-sweet grain—it was the one place the noise in my head went quiet.
I’d come out here after my first heartbreak at sixteen, after Mom’s funeral, after the night I found Dad on the kitchen floor and called the ambulance with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.
The barn never asked me how I was holding up.
It just held me, the way it had held four generations of Hendersons before me.
Ginger, my mother’s old mare, nickered softly when I approached.
She was twenty-three now, too old for riding, her coat faded to gray around the muzzle.
But I’d never been able to let her go. She was my last living connection to Mom—the horse she’d trained, ridden across these hills when I was a girl watching from the fence rail.
“Can’t sleep either?” I murmured, scratching behind her ears.
“Can’t sleep either?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Walker stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the star-bright sky, jeans and a faded T-shirt, hair rumpled, feet shoved bare into boots.
“It’s three in the morning,” I said.
“Couldn’t sleep. Saw the light from the road.” A ghost of a smile. “Better than staring at motel ceilings counting water stains. There are forty-seven, by the way.”
That, at least, I understood. He moved to stand beside me at the stall, close enough that I caught something clean and masculine under the cheap motel soap.
“She was my mother’s horse,” I said before I could stop myself.
“One of the few things I have left of her.” I never talked about my mother.
Not with anyone, not even Dakota. But something about the dark and the warm presence of the horses made confession feel safer.
“Cancer. I was twelve when she was diagnosed, thirteen when she died. Three days after my birthday. We’d had cake in her hospital room, and she told me she was proud of the woman I was becoming. Three days later she was gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Dad fell apart after. Couldn’t get out of bed some days.
Brody was eight, Lily was six. Someone had to make sure they got fed, got their homework done, kept the house from falling apart while he tried to put himself back together.
” I laughed, hollow in the quiet barn. “So I did. I’ve been holding things together ever since.
Sometimes I wonder if I even know how to do anything else. ”
Walker was quiet a moment, his shoulder close to mine.
“My father died when I was seventeen. Heart attack. He’d been working himself to death trying to save our ranch—up before dawn, never quitting until after dark.
I was the one who found him in the barn one morning.
And the worst part was, it didn’t even matter.
We lost the ranch anyway.” His voice caught.
“I spent years feeling like if I’d just done more, worked harder, somehow forced him to slow down, he’d still be alive.
Logic doesn’t always win against grief. The heart believes what it believes. ”
I met his gaze, really seeing him for the first time. The polished broker was gone. In his place was just a man—tired and honest, carrying his own weight of loss. We were more alike than I’d realized. Both shaped by grief, both forced to grow up too fast.
“You can’t pour from an empty cup, Cass,” he said. “At some point you have to let someone help.”
“I don’t know how. I’ve been doing this alone so long, I’ve forgotten how to share the load. Maybe I never knew. It’s always been me, holding things together, being the strong one.”
“It’s not too late to learn.” He’d moved closer. I could feel the warmth of him, the solid presence that had somehow become familiar over two weeks. My heart picked up, and not from fear this time.
“You’re not what I expected,” I said.
“Neither are you.”
The air between us was charged. My gaze dropped to his mouth and quickly away. This was dangerous—not because he meant me harm, but because he made me want things I’d stopped letting myself want years ago. Connection. Comfort. Someone to share the weight.
I stepped back, breaking the spell before it could solidify into something I couldn’t walk away from. “We should get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”
At the porch, he turned. “Cass. For what it’s worth, I think you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. Anyone who can carry what you’ve carried, this long—that takes more courage than most people have in their whole lives.”
Nobody had ever said anything like that to me. People said I was capable. Reliable. Not strong. Not brave.
“Thank you,” I managed, barely above a whisper.
He held my gaze a moment longer, then walked to his truck. I went inside and lay awake until dawn, thinking about a man I shouldn’t be thinking about.