Chapter 5
JACE
The lockbox sat on the mudroom shelf for three days before I moved it to the truck bed and drove it out to the storage unit by the highway. Not because I'd figured out what it meant. Because I hadn't.
The journal underneath it was worse. Thorough, deliberate entries suggested the feud both families treated as historical fact had started from something a lot smaller than either side admitted. I wasn't ready to do anything with that.
So I put it in a unit I paid forty dollars a month for, drove back home, and told myself I'd deal with it later.
I wish I could have done the same thing with Bella.
She was up at six every morning. I could hear her boots on the loft floor, the specific weight of her moving from the bed to the small kitchen, the sound of her camera bag being zipped.
I'd started waking before she did. I'd also started drinking my coffee at the workbench instead of the kitchen window, which was a choice I didn't examine too closely.
The almost-kiss — I didn't have another word for it, though I wasn’t too thrilled with calling it that — had shifted something I couldn't shift back. Not because anything had happened. But because of how clearly we'd both understood what almost had.
I wasn’t going to act on it. Bella Robbins was here through June, maybe a few days into July if her assignment kept getting extended. She photographed people's lives and then she left. That was her life, and it had nothing to do with mine. But Rory liked her. That was a problem.
I finished my coffee and headed out to mend the fence along the edge of one of the practice rings.
Rory came through the gate with her phone in her hand and her hair still in a braid from the night before.
That meant she'd been up a while and had been working herself up to something. I knew her tells.
“Dad.”
“Hand me that clip.”
She did. I set it without looking up.
“Bella's going out to the rodeo grounds this afternoon. For the Father's Day setup. She’s trying to get candid shots of the families coming in for the rehearsal events.”
“Is that so?”
“She could use a second person to handle the reflector.”
I straightened. Rory was watching me with an expression she'd developed over the last year. Her shoulders slumped as she anticipated being disappointed, like she'd already rehearsed losing this argument. That expression made her hard to look at.
“A reflector, huh?” I asked.
“It's a big silver panel thing that bounces light. She explained it to me. I know how to use it.”
“I know what a reflector is, Rory.”
She waited.
The fence post was solid. I had two more sections to check and a water trough that needed the float valve replaced before noon.
I had things to do, and letting my fifteen-year-old spend the afternoon learning to hold light for a photographer wasn’t going to compromise anything except my ability to tell myself we were all maintaining proper distance.
“You stay behind the yellow lines,” I said. “Both of you.”
Her frown shifted into a smile so fast it made my head spin.
“Both of you,” I said again. “That’s not up for negotiation.”
“Yeah.” She was already backing toward the barn. “Yeah, obviously. Thank you.”
I watched her go. She shouldn't have to thank me for that. That should be ordinary. I was still working out when I'd made ordinary things feel like victories she had to campaign for.
They rolled out a little after one. I stayed home and replaced the float valve and told myself it was fine. It was fine.
I was in the kitchen at four when they came back.
Rory’s voice came through the screen door before she'd cleared the porch steps.
I met her outside and she showed me a shot on Bella's camera preview screen she’d taken of a father and his young daughter by the chute.
The little girl looked up at her dad with a huge smile, with her whole face wide open.
“Look at the light,” Rory said. “That's what I was holding for.”
Bella stood slightly behind her, watching me.
“Good work,” I said.
Rory went on, cycling through images that she’d captured until I’d seen them all.
I complimented her, my heart feeling light and full at the excitement in her tone.
When she was done, she kissed me on the cheek and headed upstairs to shower.
Bella took cautious steps up onto the porch.
She had dust on her collarbone, and her hair was loose from whatever she'd tied it back with this morning.
“She has a good eye,” Bella said. “I mean it.”
“I know.”
“I thought you should hear it from someone who isn’t related to her.”
I looked at her. She looked back, and the late afternoon light was doing things I was choosing not to acknowledge.
“Thank you,” I said. “For bringing her back in one piece.”
“She was careful.” The corner of her mouth moved. “She listened better than you did on day one.”
“Me?” A sharp laugh escaped.
Bella nodded but before she could say anything else, my phone rang. I almost didn't answer. I didn’t recognize the number, but I knew it was Dana the same way I knew a storm was coming before dark clouds swept in.
“I need to take this.” My chest tightened as Bella gave a little wave and turned away. I waited until she was halfway to the barn before I answered.
“Jace.” Dana’s voice was bright and full of fake cheer, the way it got when she wanted something. “I'm passing through this weekend. I thought I could stop in and see Rory.”
Dammit. She always pulled shit like this. Blew into town with no notice at all and expected us to rearrange our plans to accommodate her. Of course I’d always done it for Rory’s sake. “Where are you staying?”
“The lodge. Just one night, Saturday into Sunday.”
The lodge was forty minutes from Mustang Mountain and three stars nicer than anything in town. Dana didn't do rodeo accommodations.
“She’s helping with the Father’s Day rehearsal events on Sunday afternoon,” I said.
“I'd have her back by one.”
I stood on the porch with my hand on the door frame and thought about the last time Dana had said she'd have Rory back by a specific time.
That had been October. Rory had waited on the porch until nearly seven, not saying anything, just sitting with her knees pulled up and her phone dark in her hand. I'd made dinner twice.
“Let me talk to Rory about it,” I said.
“Of course.” Her tone softened in that practiced way. “I'm not trying to disrupt anything, Jace. I just miss her.”
I didn't say what I was thinking. Instead, I hung up and went to find my daughter.
Rory sat on her bed, her long hair wrapped in a towel, wearing her favorite Luke Bryan t-shirt and a pair of cut-off shorts. When I told her about her mom being in town, she went quiet in the careful way she did when she was deciding how much she wanted something.
“She actually called?” Rory asked.
“She did.”
Rory looked at her hands. Then out the window. A long stretch of silence meant she was weighing hope against experience. I knew what I wanted her to decide, and I knew exactly how wrong it was for me to want it.
“Can I go?”
Every part of me wanted to list the history. October. The spring before that. The birthday she'd sent a card for two weeks late with a gift card inside that had already been partially used. I’d memorized the list. Rory knew the list better than I did.
“If you want to go, I can take you out there Saturday afternoon after I check the rodeo grounds,” I said.
She looked up.
“And if she doesn't get you back by one on Sunday, I’ll drive out there myself.”
“She'll get me back.” Rory got up and walked over to where I stood by the door. She didn't hug me, but she put her hand on my shoulder briefly, just for a second, before she left the room.
Looked like things were settled, even if nothing about it felt settled to me.
Saturday came too fast. I dropped Rory at the lodge at five.
She had her overnight bag and her phone, and she'd changed her shirt twice before we left.
Dana came out to the truck looking the way she always looked — good, put together, like life was going better than it probably was — and she hugged Rory and waved at me with the pleasant neutrality of someone who'd filed everything difficult away in a drawer.
The drive back took forty minutes, and I spent most of it trying not to think about the last time I'd had a completely quiet house. I couldn't remember when.
Slade had someone else covering the final night checks out at the grounds, so I had nothing to do but feed the horses then feed myself.
I made something I didn't taste. I checked the hinges on the gate I'd been meaning to replace for a month, and after that I ran out of tasks that needed doing, so I stood in the barn in the early evening light with nothing to do and no one to do it for.
The silence settled into my bones the way it did when I stopped moving long enough to feel it.
Then Bella's footsteps sounded on the loft stairs. She came down slowly, like she wasn't sure if she’d be welcome. She had on a pair of faded jeans, a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a worn tank and held her boots in her hand.
“I saw you drive back alone,” she said.
“She went to her mother's for the night.”
Bella nodded. She set her boots down near the stairs and came to stand near the open barn door, looking out at the paddock the way I'd been looking at it for the last half hour.
“You didn't want to let her go.” It wasn’t a question.
“No.”
“But you did.”
The paddock was empty in the long evening light. Cutter stood motionless at the far fence. The whole ranch felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for something.
“Saying no would've just told her I don't trust her to handle disappointment,” I said. “And she can handle it.” I paused. “Better than I can, probably.”
Bella turned to look at me. “You've built everything around being the one she can count on. That’s a big commitment, Jace.”
“It's just—”
“Don't say it's just parenting.”
I didn't. She was close enough that I could see the faint freckles along her shoulder where the flannel had slipped. The light was going gold and low and I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. And she stood there, looking at me like I was someone worth looking at.
I'd been holding myself at a very specific distance from Bella Robbins for three weeks. Now, I closed it.
She didn't move back. She tilted her chin up slightly, and I put my hand against the side of her face. Then I kissed her like a man who understood exactly what line he was crossing and did it anyway.
She kissed me back, bringing one hand up to rest on my chest. The kiss was slow and deep and better than I had any right to expect from someone I'd spent considerable energy avoiding.
I pulled back just enough to look at her. Her eyes opened. The hazel was more gold than green in this light, and she watched me with a steadiness that said she was waiting to see what I’d do next.
“Rory comes back tomorrow,” I said.
“I know.”
“And after that—”
“Jace.” Her voice was quiet. “I know.”
I dropped my hand from her face. She didn't step away. We stood in the open barn door in the early evening light and the house behind me empty, and I was aware — with perfect, inconvenient clarity — that the next choice was not one I could make tonight and walk back from in the morning.