10. Epilogue
Epilogue
Imogen
The sign stands where our lane meets the road, welded steel, CROSSFIELD FARM in the big letters. Beneath it, smaller: MERCER EQUINE REHABILITATION.
Some evenings I walk down the drive just to look at it.
I allow myself that.
Sixty acres, and neither of us inherited a single one.
The land was a run-down cattle place for decades and still admits it, rusted wire coming down field by field as the new oak board goes up.
The farmhouse is white frame and unbothered by grandeur, with heart-pine floors so crooked that anything dropped in the front room rolls toward the kitchen, where the coffee is anyway.
The barn is another matter.
We built it new, to my specification, and every sightline, gate, and stall in it is placed for the comfort of frightened horses: twelve oversized stalls, one wide rubber-floored aisle, turnout paddocks screened so a worried horse never has to watch the thing that worries him.
Nothing on this property is built for display.
The horses that come down my lane are the frightened, the mishandled, the ones somebody was rough with and then blamed. I learned what to do about that at Hart's Run, and I finished learning it from a near-black stallion.
The stalls stay full.
Reed keeps the second desk in the tack-room office, bloodstock work under his own judgment, a working life built entirely outside the position he was born to carry. The wealth stayed. The inheritance did not.
In fourteen months, I have yet to catch him looking back.
The biggest change in our marriage is ordinary enough that nobody else would notice it.
Reed asks.
What do you think?
Do you want to go?
Is this all right?
What do you need?
He asks before he decides, and then he listens to the answer.
Last month a new client walking the barn with us took me for an employee and asked when he might speak to the owner.
"He already is," Reed said pleasantly. "Imogen owns the farm."
The man flushed and apologized. Reed carried the conversation on from there as if nothing remarkable had happened.
Nothing remarkable had.
That may be my favorite part.
Vivian has begun, carefully, to make contact. Reed and I decide together when we see her and when we don't. Some visits go better than others.
Whitney is no longer part of our lives.
Tru grazes in the end paddock by the creek, the best grass on the farm, a fact he treats as no more than his due.
When Sorrel Gate finally chose to sell him rather than keep managing the care his history requires, we bought him at fair market value. His record and his bloodlines are worth every dollar of it; he was not discarded.
He simply came home with us.
What happens to him now—his training, his competition, his future—is my professional call. He remains intelligent, watchful, sensitive as ever, and unmistakably himself.
On my left hand is a plain gold band Reed and I chose together.
No Calloway history. No inherited expectation. No previous owner.
The light is going long and gold on the barn's west wall when I start back up the drive.
Reed comes out of the barn to meet me, the even tread every horse on this farm has already memorized. He falls into step beside me.
"Evening stables?"
"Evening stables."
He takes the empty bucket from my hand.
I let him.
We walk the aisle together, checking latches and water, stopping twice because Reed has somehow become the preferred scratching post of a chestnut mare with no respect for personal space.
The end paddock comes last.
Tru's ear finds me before his head does.
Then his dark head lifts over the gate, the small star catching the last of the light. He watches us approach, alert but quiet, and when I reach him he lowers his nose into my palm.
Reed stands beside me.
His hand brushes mine once.
He waits.
I turn my hand over and lace my fingers through his.
Fourteen months ago, I left Sorrel Gate with an empty ring finger and no idea whether loving Reed would ever be enough reason to live with him again.
It wasn't.
This is.
The farm. The work. The life we chose together.
And the husband standing beside me, waiting for me to choose his hand.
I squeeze it once.
Then we walk home.
THE END