2. Chapter 2
Imogen
Ten years as a Calloway, and everything I owned before I became one fits into two cardboard boxes with room left over.
I pack quickly, because Reed is meant to be at the estate office until six and I would rather do this without an audience.
Riding clothes gone soft at the knee and elbow.
The photographs from my Hart's Run years, most of them of horses, all of them of people who were glad I was there.
My certificates in their cheap black frames, made out to Imogen Mercer, a professional nobody has introduced me as in a decade.
The books from those years, spines cracked white.
My old saddle is already in the truck bed, along with the bridle the Sorrel Gate grooms spent years trying to retire; the leather is scarred and soft and knows my hands.
The closet I leave nearly whole. The dresses, the right coats, the shoes that never put a foot wrong. All of it was bought for being Reed Calloway's wife, and none of it is coming to Della's.
The room itself is harder. Reed's books have migrated to my nightstand a few at a time, ten years of him reading until I fell asleep and setting each one down where I'd drifted off.
My barn sweater hangs between his tailored coats, where he hung it as if it were worth something.
The window behind the bed stands open its winter two inches.
He learned in our first December that I sleep with cold air on my face, and he has slept under an extra blanket ever since without calling it a favor.
In his top drawer there will be a pair of my gloves. I can never find my gloves. He buys them the way other men buy batteries.
We were happy in this room. Packing doesn't make that less true. It only makes leaving hurt in places anger can't reach.
Tires on gravel, the front door, his tread on the stairs, unhurried even now. Reed stops in the bedroom doorway, still in his farm clothes.
"You're supposed to be at the office until six," I say.
"I know whose truck that is." He looks at the boxes a long moment. "I'm glad you're here. We can sort this, Imogen. Once everything settles."
Three days have put a new line under each eye, and the stubble is winning earlier than usual. He crosses to the dresser, takes the ring from his breast pocket, and sets it on the wood between us. The stone catches the afternoon the way it catches everything.
"I spoke with my mother. Privately. What she said at that table was unacceptable, and I told her so." He touches one finger to the edge of the ring, then lets his hand fall. "And the credit for Tru will be corrected. I'll make certain everyone who matters knows the work was yours."
Everyone who matters.
He still thinks the right people can be told afterward and that will undo what happened in front of everyone else.
"Reed." I fold the flaps of the first box closed.
"The dinner didn't create this. It revealed it.
You knew the toast was false while our glasses were still in the air.
You knew exactly what your mother was doing when she got wistful about that ring.
You saw all of it, and you decided the thing that needed managing was me.
A hand under the table, your wife kept calm, the room left standing exactly as it was.
That's not one bad evening. That's the last ten years, with everyone watching. "
He doesn't look away. He never does.
"Then tell me what you want changed," he says. "Name it, all of it. Give me a list, and I will handle every item on it."
Of course he wants a list. Something clear enough to finish. Something he can point to afterward and know he did what was asked.
"If I gave you one," I say, "you'd fix every problem I named and still miss why I had to name them for you."
When Reed doesn't know what to say, he says nothing. It's the most honest habit he has.
"There's something I need before I go," I say. "Come down to the barn."
We walk down to the rehabilitation barn without talking, past the paddocks going gold in the late light.
In the office at the barn's end, the wall calendar is filled through November in my handwriting, and the stall cards sit straight in their rack.
I take the binder off the desk and open it on the counter between us.
Schedule, feed, triggers, the warning sequence, the handling notes of eight months.
"Everything is current," I say. "His routine holds, same order, every day.
Nobody new handles him without a slow introduction, and nothing about the gala gets brought to him.
No crowds, no tent, no noise for his own good.
You cannot desensitize a horse like Tru in six weeks.
You can only teach him that his fear was right.
If anything changes, it changes one thing at a time, and his exit stays open. Always."
"The protocols will be followed." Reed sets his hand flat on the binder, the whole man behind it. "I'll put this in Whitney's hands myself. Page by page. Nothing happens to that horse, Imogen."
He means it. Reed meaning it has never once been the problem.
We walk back up to the house. He lifts the heavier box before I can reach it, the one with the books, and carries it down the stairs and out across the gravel.
At the truck, the tailgate sticks the way it has stuck since before he knew me.
Reed takes the handle, lifts, knocks the left corner once with the heel of his hand, and lowers it open in one smooth motion.
He has done it so many times he doesn't have to think. He slides the box in beside the saddle.
If he had argued on the stairs, anger could have carried me the rest of the way out. Instead he knows which box is heavy. He knows how my tailgate sticks. He knows exactly when to take something from my hands without making me feel helpless.
Leaving him would be easier if he were cruel.
I mean to drive straight down the avenue. At the stone roundel I turn toward the rehabilitation barn instead.
Tru's ear finds my voice before his head comes around; it's the first thing he ever gave me, that ear.
He leaves his hay, crosses the stall, and drops his head over the door, breathing me in.
Warm horse, clean shavings, the eucalyptus liniment along his back.
I rub the underside of his neck and he settles his weight the way he does for the people on his short list.
"You did everything right," I tell him, in the voice I use for nothing else. "Every single thing. That was never the trouble."
Walking out of the house today was hard. Walking away from this stall is the closest I have come, all day, to not being able to.
Reed's step comes down the aisle behind me, deliberate and even, the tread every horse in this barn knows. Tru's ear flicks to him and back to me.
"He'll miss you," Reed says. "You'll want to see him. Eight miles is nothing, Imogen. Whatever else needs sorting, he'll still be here. So will I."
He thinks loving Tru will bring me back eventually. He still believes distance is the problem.
"Take care of him," I say. "I'm going to Della's. Hart's Run."
He nods slowly. "Eight miles," he says again, half to himself.
I press my forehead to Tru's one more moment, then walk to the truck and drive up past the house, down the half mile of pin oaks. The gates stand open at the end of the avenue. In the mirror they swing shut behind me, Sorrel Gate arched backward in iron over an emptying drive.
"Imogen Mercer," I say, out loud, to nobody but the truck.
Ten years since anyone introduced me by it. It still sounds like someone I know.