15. Chapter 15
Rebel
By eight-thirty, I’ve watched Tana pretend she’s fine four separate times.
One of them was in the broodmare barn when she bent over to lift a feed bucket and straightened more slowly than usual, one breath held too long before she moved again. Another, at the wash rack, where she braces a palm flat to the concrete divider for a beat she thinks no one sees.
If she had gone down outright, I could’ve called Doc, cleared space, turned the problem into action. Instead, I’m left with fragments that shouldn't add up, but do.
Wade is midway through a transport rundown when Tana comes into the office with the north aisle logs.She sets them on my desk. "Juniper’s off her feed again."
Then she turns to go before I can answer.
"Tana."
She stops without looking back.
"Sit down a minute."
"I’m working."
"So am I."
That gets me a glance over her shoulder, dry and sharpened. "Okayyy."
Under any other circumstance, I might have let that pass for humor. Today it sounds strained enough to make me wonder how long she’s been holding herself together. Up close, the color has gone out of her more than I realized from across the barn.
"You look like hell," I say.
"Then I guess I'm lucky that being pretty wasn’t in the job description."
Wade clears his throat from the file cabinet, suddenly fascinated by a stack of invoices. Tana shifts her weight, not toward the chair I indicated, but toward the door.
What catches me hardest is not how she looks worn thin, but how she seems to brace for me before I’ve even decided what I’m going to say.
The interruption comes from the yard before I can press her any harder.
A horse hits the side of the trailer with a metallic boom that rattles the office window. Wade's moving before the sound finishes, and Tana's already gone from the doorway by the time I step outside.
The colt is halfway up the ramp and coming apart about it.
Our young bay with expensive blood and quick feet and not enough sense yet to understand the trailer isn’t its enemy.
He lunges backward, slams a hind hoof against the narrow side panel, then throws his head high enough to threaten the handler’s grip.
Caleb swears, digs in, and makes the mistake of pulling harder.
The colt comes up crooked, whites showing in his eyes, and front feet skating against the ramp mat.
"Stop pulling him," Tana snaps, already crossing the yard.
Caleb freezes long enough for her to get to the trailer. She takes the lead lower on the rope and shifts the colt just enough to straighten him on the ramp.
"Easy," she says.
He gives her one second of steadier footing before a truck backfires out on the road.
The sound cracks through the yard, and the colt blows straight through what little calm he had left.
He launches sideways, shoulder hitting the trailer frame, and the lead rope jerks hard.
Tana pivots with him instead of against him, but I see the moment her balance goes wrong.
Her free hand catches the trailer wall, then her knees buckle.
I’m off the office steps and across the driveway in a split second.
By the time I reach the trailer, the colt is still scrambling and Tana is trying to give ground without losing the line entirely.
"Let him go," I bark at Caleb. "All of it."
He drops the extra tension too late to be graceful, but it’s enough. The colt lands hard, skids backward off the ramp, and stands blowing with the lead slack for one blessed second, as Tana steps off to the side just enough to avoid taking the full force of him if he surges again.
All of a sudden she sways.
It isn’t the colt or the footing that throws her off. It’s her own body giving way under her.
I catch her under the arms before she hits the trailer wall. Her weight comes into me lighter than it should, all strain and heat and resistance. "Easy," I say, though I’m not speaking to the horse anymore.
"I’m ok," she snaps, which would carry more conviction if she wasn’t gripping my sleeve hard enough to crease it.
"No, you’re not."
I hand the lead to Wade without taking my eyes off her. "Get the colt off the yard and keep him moving until he settles. Caleb, shut that trailer up and keep the lane clear."
Everyone within earshot starts to hustle, as they take note of the seriousness in my voice.
Although Tana tries to straighten out of my hold, her knees are still not cooperating.
"Enough," I say, lower now. "Sit down before you make me carry you somewhere safe."
Everyone within twenty feet looks somewhere else.
Her face changes at that, anger cutting through the washed-out look for one useful second. "Rebel, you don’t get to order me around like I’m one of your horses."
"Then stop scaring me like you’re about to fold in half in the middle of the driveway."
The words leave my mouth before I can do anything intelligent with them.
I feel the shift around us at once … Wade hearing too much and Caleb pretending not to.
The smarter move would be to give her room and let everyone read this however they want.
I don’t do that. I get her to the mounting block by the fence and keep my hand at her elbow until she sits. Let them think what they like. I’m not standing back while she nearly folds in front of me.
She lasts exactly twelve seconds on the mounting block before she decides sitting still is worse than fighting me.
"I said I’m fine," she says again, pushing up too fast.
Her body betrays her immediately. The color drains even further, and she has to catch the fence rail with one hand. I step in before she can resent the need for it, one palm at her back, the other closing around her forearm.
"Don’t," I say.
"Don’t what? Embarrass myself in public? A little late for that."
"Don’t worry about that." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "Wade, get water. And somebody move that damned trailer."
Tana tries to pull her arm free. I don’t let go.
"You can stop managing me now," she says quietly.
“The moment you stop looking like you might fold up on me, I’ll think about it.”
That gets a glare out of her sharp enough to reassure me more than anything else has in the last five minutes.
Wade comes back with a bottle of water. I take it, twist the cap loose, and hold it out.
She looks at me, then at the bottle, then takes it like accepting help is already more concession than she wants on the record.
“Drink.”
Her fingers close hard around the plastic. She takes a few careful swallows while I stay close enough to steady her if I have to and not so close the whole yard starts building a story around it.
The problem is, I know exactly why I’m standing here like this, and management has very little to do with it.
I get her as far as the tack room before she turns on me.
There’s nothing dramatic in it. She just stops in the doorway, one hand braced on the frame, and looks at me with a kind of worn-out anger that feels earned.
“I’m not doing this out here,” she says.
“Then come inside.”
She hesitates, and that tells me more than the words did. Then she steps in and I pull the door mostly shut behind us, enough to cut off the aisle without making the room feel sealed.
The tack room smells like oil worked into old leather, dust shaken loose from saddle blankets, and the faint sour edge of sweat dried into things that still get used too hard.
Tana goes to the workbench and folds her arms tight across herself.
She stands like a woman already halfway gone, just waiting to hear whether I’m stupid enough to make her finish the job.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I say.
“You saw what was going on.” She keeps her eyes on me. “I got lightheaded. Then it passed.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Well,” she says, tired and sharp at the same time, “that’s the version I’ve got for you.”
I take a step closer. "You’ve looked off for days. You’re pale, you’re shaky, you’re not eating enough, and now you nearly collapsed in the driveway. Don’t ask me to pretend that adds up to nothing."
Her mouth tightens. "Maybe I’m just tired."
"Everyone here is tired."
"Maybe I’m more tired than everyone here."
I stare at her long enough that the silence starts to grip in. She breaks it first, voice flatter now.
"I haven’t been sleeping well. I skipped breakfast. The smell of the diesel exhaust out there turned my stomach. Happy?"
No. Not even remotely. Any one of them could be true, but together they feel “Do you need Rhodes?” I ask.
Her head comes up so fast it feels more reflex than thought. “No.”
I hear the edge in my own voice before I mean to use it. “Tana.”
She goes still.
I know she’s holding something back. What I don’t know is whether pushing harder gets me the truth or just sends her farther into herself, and right now I can’t afford either.
So I let the pressure off first.
“Fine,” I say, though nothing about this feels fine. “But if it happens again, you tell me before you try to work through it.”
That gets me a look I can’t sort fast enough. Anger is in it. So is embarrassment. Maybe relief too, buried somewhere deeper.
“I’ve got work to do,” she says.
Then she is gone before I can decide whether stopping her would help or only make things worse, and I am left standing there with the distinct feeling that she gave me just enough truth to get free of the room.
The afternoon gets done because Wild Mercy does not stop just because the people inside it would like a minute to get their heads straight.
But the part that keeps coming back is not the colt or the trailer.
It is the sight of her knees starting to go while she was still trying to stay in the job, still trying to keep the horse steady, still trying not to make herself anybody else’s problem.
My first thought was not the yard watching. Not liability. Not the price of a prospect getting hurt because somebody missed a step.
It was getting to her before she hit the ground.
I stop outside the lower barn next to the fence rail and look across the winter-browned pasture, the forever fields stretched out beyond it in long, tired acres that usually calm me more than they do tonight.
Midge circles back and drops at my boots.
I had it backward.
Wanting Tana was never the thing making me careless. What hit me today, hard enough to wipe out everything else, was fear.
I’m not standing here trying to keep my hands off a woman who gets under my skin.
I’m standing here looking at the fact that I love her.
It doesn’t come with any rush to it. No shock. No clean break in the world. It settles in like something that has been working its way toward me for a while and has finally caught up.
I don’t feel better for knowing it. I feel trapped by it.
Because love is no use to me here. It doesn’t tell me what she kept from me. It doesn’t fix the way she braces when I come too close, or the way every step I take toward her seems to send her farther back into herself.
All it does is change the scale of the loss.
Losing her is no longer something I could survive by calling it bad timing and moving on.
It looks like ruin now, and that is a much more dangerous thing to know.
I find her again at dusk in the lower barn, alone with Sable.
The mare stands loose in the grooming stall with one hind leg resting, head low, while Tana works the brush down her neck in long, even strokes that seem to settle them both.
The last light is slipping in through the aisle doors, thin and coppery, catching on dust and the soft lift of Sable’s coat where the bristles pass.
The whole barn has that end-of-day hush to it, not silence exactly, just the kind of quiet that makes the sound of brush through hair feel louder than it is.
Tana looks wrung out. Not fragile. Not delicate. Just worn down to the point where every movement looks borrowed from whatever she has left, and something in me goes angry at the sight of it. Not toward her. Toward anything that helped put that look on her.
"You should be done for the day," I say.
She keeps brushing. "You should mind your own business."
"Ouch … Ok, but you made that my business this morning."
That gets her attention. She stills the brush against Sable’s shoulder and turns just enough to look at me.
"What exactly do you want from me, Rebel?" she asks.
"The truth," I say finally.
A short, ugly sound gets out of her. “You can’t even hold the part you already know.”
That one lands.
I feel it low and immediate, like she found the one place in me that was already bruised and pressed anyway.
“Try me.”
Her eyes lift to mine. She looks cornered, worn thin, and so far from trusting me that the few feet between us stop feeling like distance and start feeling earned.
For one suspended second, I think she might say it. Whatever she’s been carrying around with both hands, whatever has been making her flinch from me and brace at the same time.
Instead she steps back.
“Good night, Rebel.”
I stay where I am with one hand still locked around the stall latch, the metal biting into my palm hard enough that I should let go and don’t.
The smarter move would be to leave it alone. Let it come when it comes, if it comes, and not crowd her into saying something she clearly does not trust me enough to put in my hands.
But standing there, all I’m left with is the hard, unsparing fact of it: something’s wrong, and whatever it is has already taught her to keep me outside it.
By the time I walk out of the barn, everything has narrowed down to two things I can’t argue with.
I love her.
And whatever she’s hiding is already building a wall I don’t know how to get through.