Chapter 5 #2
“Do you want me to ask around?” she says.
My stomach flips.
Ask around means people know.
People knowing means gossip.
Gossip means questions.
Questions mean eventually one of the brothers asks why the new accountant is losing things five minutes after being trusted with anything important.
“No,” I say too fast. Then, softer, “Not yet.”
Sherry leans against the doorframe. “Annie, if someone took it—”
“Then I should’ve been more careful.”
Sherry’s mouth parts slightly, and I hate myself more than the situation because now she’s looking at me with that expression people get when they realize your bad jokes are built on bad foundations.
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I know.” I drag in a breath. “I know.”
But my body doesn’t know.
My body knows I’m twenty-nine years old and still carrying around little pieces of people who loved me badly, because evidence feels safer than memory.
My body knows that the card missing isn’t just inconvenient. It’s invasive.
Those photos are mine. Private in the stupid, emotional way that matters more than financial records ever could.
I can rebuild a spreadsheet. I can reconstruct numbers.
I can’t recreate the exact angle of my brother laughing with his head tipped back in late afternoon sun, grease on his hands from some terrible decision involving a motorcycle and misplaced optimism.
I can’t recreate proof that there were moments with my parents that weren’t all edges.
I sit down too suddenly in the desk chair, and it rolls back a few inches with a soft whine.
Sherry crouches beside me. “Hey.”
I stare at the floor.
“This card,” she says carefully. “Did it have work photos on it? Of Ironwood?”
“No.” Then, because honesty arrives late but loud, “More old ones. Family stuff. Travel. Everything.”
“Oh.”
There’s pity in that single syllable, and I can’t stand it. Not because she means harm, because she doesn’t. Because kindness always feels more dangerous when I’m already coming apart.
I stand again before I can embarrass myself further. “I just need a minute.”
“Do you want me to call one of the guys?”
I shake my head.
Absolutely not.
Silas would go still in that terrifying way he has and start asking questions with his jaw locked, like he’s interviewing a suspect instead of helping a person.
Cody would probably want a timeline, an inventory, and the exact molecular structure of my last known location. Neither of which is objectively unreasonable, which somehow makes it worse.
And beneath that’s the simpler, uglier fear.
I don’t want them to think I’m a problem.
Not yet.
Not when I’m just beginning to prove I’m useful.
Not when part of me is still trying to outrun every version of every place where needing help turned into owing for it.
“No,” I say. “No, it’s… I just need air.”
Sherry rises with me, concern still written all over her face. “Okay. But Annie?” I look at her. “If you decide this isn’t nothing, don’t sit on it.”
That should be easy advice.
Instead it catches in my chest like a splinter.
I leave through the side door with my camera clutched in one hand and my bag hanging half-zipped off my shoulder like I lost the ability to operate closures sometime in the last hour.
The cold hits me first.
It should help. Usually does. Fresh air has fixed at least a third of my worst moods and maybe twelve percent of my bad decisions.
Today it barely makes a dent.
The yard stretches wide under a pale morning sky. Barns red and immaculate, fences straight, horses moving in distant paddocks with the same expensive calm everything at Ironwood seems born wearing.
I walk without deciding where.
Across the gravel, past the side of the house, around a stack of feed bins. My thoughts skid uselessly in every direction.
Maybe I left the card at that rodeo grounds weeks ago. No.
Maybe it fell between the seat and console in my car. I checked.
Maybe I’m having some kind of stress-induced false memory and it was never in the bag to begin with. No.
I know my own systems. I know where things go. That card lives in the third slot from the left because it’s old and important and I like keeping the things that matter where my hands can find them without my brain getting involved.
Someone touched my desk.
Someone opened the wallet.
Or maybe no one did, whispers the meanest part of my mind. Maybe you’re just tired. Maybe you’re sloppy and dressing it up as violation because admitting you lost it feels worse.
I stop walking.
My thumb taps once against the side of my camera body.
Wait.
Twice.
Look closer.
I shut my eyes.
What do I actually know?
The drawer was open. The pen cup was moved. The wallet was unzipped. The card is gone.
That’s what I know.
I keep walking toward the barns.
By the time I step inside, everything changes. It’s cooler. Rich with hay, dust, leather, and that deep animal warmth that settles into wood over years.
It’s tranquil here, but not silent. A horse shifts in a stall. Somewhere farther back, metal clinks softly against metal.
The familiar scents and sounds should calm me down.
Instead I make it three steps in and stop beside a stack of feed sacks because suddenly if I keep moving, I might actually fall apart.
So that’s fun.
I grip my camera strap so hard my fingers ache.
This is stupid. It’s one memory card.
One.
Except it isn’t.
Because the truth is I’ve spent years making my life portable. Temp jobs. Short contracts. New towns. New rooms. New roads.
Always an exit strategy. Always a bag half-packed in my head even when the dresser drawers say otherwise.
People think that means I’m brave or independent or adventurous.
Sometimes it means I’m running before anything can root hard enough to hurt.
The photos are part of how I cheat that.
Proof that the last place existed. Proof that I existed in it. Proof that not every goodbye erased what came before. And family…
Family is a generous word for what I’ve got.
My mother likes control dressed up as concern. My father perfected emotional absence into an art form somewhere around the time I learned to stop expecting him to show up fully.
Evan is the only one who ever feels easy, and even he’s the kind of easy that arrives with drama tucked under one arm and an apology half-written in his pocket.
But I love them anyway.
Which is humiliatingly on brand for me.
I have photos of Evan asleep on my old couch with his boots still on because he drove four hours to see me after one breakup and pretended it was casual.
I have one of my mother laughing at something off-camera when she didn’t know I was there with the lens.
I have one of my father with his hand on my shoulder at a marina when I was twenty-three, both of us looking sunburned and awkward and almost, almost like people who might figure it out.
Maybe nobody else would understand why those things matter.
Maybe nobody else would understand why losing them feels like someone reached into my chest and put a hand around something soft just to see if it would bruise.
The barn blurs.
I blink hard.
Absolutely not.
I’m not crying in a giant barn before noon on a Monday because life decided to mug me via digital storage.
“Annie?”
I jerk at the sound of my name.
Duke stands a few yards away in the open aisle between stalls, a metal Thermos in one hand and a look on his face I don’t have the energy to decode.
He’s in a dark henley with the sleeves pushed up, jeans dusty at the knees, brown hair more unruly than usual, like he’s been running his hands through it.
He must’ve come in quietly, which feels unfair. A man his size should creak a little for the sake of preparedness.
“You okay?”
And that’s the moment I crumble.