22. Bree
— ? —
Bree
The county stock show was exactly what we needed.
Two towns over, in a fairground that had seen better decades, surrounded by farmers and their animals and chaos only rural America could produce. Rosie had been vibrating with excitement since we’d loaded Snowball, her wool lamb, into the trailer that morning.
“Snowball is going to win,” she announced from her car seat. “I know it. I can feel it.”
“Feeling is important,” Rafael said from the passenger seat. “But let’s also remember that winning isn’t everything.”
“That’s what losers say.”
I choked on my coffee.
Rafael turned to stare at me. “Did you teach her that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bree.”
“She’s four. She has her own opinions.”
“Mommy says winning is the only thing worth doing,” Rosie continued helpfully. “She says second place is just the first loser.”
“I said that one time. At a poker game. When she wasn’t supposed to be listening.”
“I was listening,” Rosie confirmed.
Rafael shook his head, but he was smiling. “Your mother is a bad influence.”
“You’re a bad influence.”
“I haven’t taught her anything about winning.”
This was a lie. Rosie had spent the whole morning explaining to her stuffed animals the most efficient order in which to be served imaginary tea.
“You taught her to calculate optimal building-block ratios. She used the word ‘optimal’ at preschool last week. The teacher called me.”
“Optimal is a good word,” he said, unrepentant.
“For a four-year-old?”
“For anyone who values precision.”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing. The banter had become automatic over the past weeks, the back-and-forth as natural as breathing. I kept waiting for it to feel wrong, for the reality of our history to crash back down and remind me why I shouldn’t be enjoying this.
It hadn’t happened yet.
The fairground was crowded. Dust rose from the gravel parking lot. The smell of livestock and fried food hung in the air. We parked, unloaded Snowball (who was unimpressed with the whole situation), and made our way to the livestock pavilion where the sheep competition was being held.
Snowball bleated her displeasure at the trailer, at the crowds, at life in general. Rosie soothed her with practiced calm.
“It’s okay, Snowball. We’re going to show everyone how beautiful you are.”
Snowball didn’t seem convinced.
Rosie handled Snowball with the confidence of a seasoned professional, leading her lamb through the check-in process and into the holding area without a single misstep. Rafael watched with obvious pride, taking photos on his phone, documenting every moment.
“You’re a natural,” he told Rosie.
“I know.” She patted Snowball’s head. “We’ve been practicing.”
The competition took two hours. I stood at the rail with Rafael, watching Rosie guide Snowball through the patterns and poses the judges required. She was focused, determined, treating the whole thing with the same intensity she brought to everything.
The other kids in her age group were nervous, fidgeting, looking to their parents for reassurance. Rosie looked at no one except Snowball and the judges. She knew what she was doing, and she expected everyone else to recognize it.
“She gets that from you,” Rafael said quietly.
“Gets what?”
“The focus. The drive. The way she refuses to back down.”
“She’s four.”
“She’s your daughter.” He was looking at me now, not at the ring. “She’s also mine. But the best parts of her are all you.”
There was no answer to that.
Rosie won third place.
She was thrilled. The ribbon was blue and white, and she wore it pinned to her shirt for the rest of the day, showing it to anyone who would look. Snowball got extra treats. The world was perfect.
“Look, Mommy!” She held up the ribbon for the hundredth time. “Third place!”
“I see it, baby. I’m so proud of you.”
“I’m going to win first place next year. I just need more practice.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Carnival next,” Rosie announced after we’d returned Snowball to the trailer. “I want to see the games.”
The carnival was a small affair, a few dozen booths arranged around a central stage where a bluegrass band was playing, loud and enthusiastic. There were ring-toss games and balloon darts and one of those impossible claw machines that existed solely to frustrate children.
Cotton candy. Corn dogs. The smell of funnel cake drifting from somewhere I couldn’t see. Everything sticky and sweet and perfect.
Rafael stopped at the ring-toss.
“This game is rigged,” he said.
“All carnival games are rigged.”
“No, I mean mathematically rigged. Look at the angle of the bottles compared to the trajectory required for the rings to land. The geometry is deliberately impossible.”
“It’s ring-toss, Rafael.”
“It’s fraud.” He was genuinely indignant. “The physics don’t allow for success under normal throwing conditions. You’d need to apply backspin at precisely the right angle to counteract the bounce coefficient, and even then the margin of error is less than three percent.”
“Daddy, I want the big pig.” Rosie was pointing at the prize wall, where an enormous stuffed pig hung at the very top.
I froze.
Rafael froze.
Rosie had called him daddy.
She’d done it casually, naturally, without any apparent awareness of what she’d said. Her eyes were fixed on the stuffed pig. Her hand was tugging at his sleeve. Daddy.
Rafael looked at me over her head.
I looked back.
Neither of us said anything.
“I’ll win it,” Rafael said finally, his voice slightly hoarse. “I’ll figure out the physics.”
He bought twenty dollars’ worth of rings. I watched him study the bottles with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb, muttering calculations under his breath, testing the weight and flexibility of each ring before throwing.
The first five missed.
“The bounce coefficient is worse than I thought,” he said.
“Just throw the rings, Rafael.”
“I’m optimizing.” He weighed another ring in his palm.
“You’re overthinking.”
“Optimization is never overthinking.”
Rosie watched with total confidence. “You can do it, Daddy.”
There it was again. Daddy. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like she’d been saying it her whole life, not just for the first time on a dusty fairground in the middle of Texas.
Rafael’s jaw tightened. He picked up a ring. Studied the target. Threw.
It landed perfectly.
“YES!” Rosie shrieked.
The booth operator looked stunned. Rafael demanded the giant pig with the satisfied expression of a man who’d just proved a point to the universe.
“We already have a real pig,” I pointed out as Rosie hugged her prize.
“Now she has a subordinate,” Rafael said. “Butterbean needs someone to manage.”
I laughed. Actually laughed, the kind that broke loose from somewhere deep and surprised me on the way out. Rafael grinned at me, and for a moment, just a moment, everything felt simple.
The rest of the afternoon continued in the same vein. Rosie ran from booth to booth, dragging us behind her. Rafael won her two more prizes (a stuffed chicken and a suspicious-looking unicorn). I bought funnel cake and shared it with both of them, powdered sugar getting everywhere.
“You have sugar on your nose,” Rafael said.
“So do you.”
“I know. Rosie put it there on purpose.”
“I did,” Rosie confirmed. “You look like a snowman.”
“A very handsome snowman,” Rafael said.
“A very messy snowman,” I corrected.
Somewhere around the third booth, I noticed he’d started running a step ahead of me.
When the crowd thickened near the stage, he shifted to my off side and put himself between me and the crush without seeming to think about it.
When I reached for my water, it was already in his hand, uncapped.
I hadn’t asked for either one. He simply seemed to know what I’d need a beat before I did, quiet about it, the way most men I’d known ran a step behind.
At one point, Rosie climbed up on the fence rail near the livestock area to show us a trick she’d been practicing.
“Daddy! Daddy, watch!”
She balanced on one foot, arms out, wobbling but determined. Rafael stood below her, hands ready to catch, his face a mixture of terror and pride.
I stood beside him.
Daddy.
She was calling him daddy, and neither of us had corrected her, and it felt right. It felt terrifyingly, impossibly right, and I didn’t know what to do with that feeling except file it away and deal with it later.
And underneath the rightness, quieter and colder, was the thing I never let myself say out loud.
He was a billionaire, with lawyers on retainer and a family name that opened every door in the country.
If Rafael Grant ever decided he wanted his daughter all to himself, I wasn’t sure that ten acres and a self-defense certificate would be enough to stop him.
I wanted to believe he wouldn’t. Watching him stand under that fence rail with his hands ready to catch her, I almost did.
But wanting to believe a thing and knowing it were different animals, and I’d built my whole new life on one hard lesson, which was that I didn’t actually know what this man would do.
I’d been wrong about him before. I couldn’t afford to be wrong about this, because this time it wasn’t my heart on the table. It was hers.
“I did it!” Rosie crowed, having held the pose for approximately three seconds.
“You’re amazing,” Rafael told her.
“I know.”
We stayed until the sun started setting.
The sky turned orange and pink, painting the fairground in warm light. The bluegrass band switched to a slower number. Families started packing up, loading tired children and sleepy animals into trucks and trailers.
The drive back was quiet. Rosie fell asleep within five minutes, her head lolling against the car seat, the stuffed pig clutched in her arms. Rafael drove while I sat in the passenger seat and watched the Texas landscape roll past.
The fields stretched in every direction, golden in the fading light, an occasional farmhouse breaking the horizon along an empty road.