5. Evie
Evie
I lie still and let the gray light come up in the window—east-facing because Gabriel put me in the room that gets the morning sun—and I do the thing I’ve started doing first thing every day, the thing I haven’t told a soul.
I place my hand on my stomach under the covers, in the dark, where it’s just me.
Twenty weeks and five days now. I press my palm to the new curve and breathe and say good morning.
“Okay,” I tell the ceiling. “Okay. We’re really doing this.”
The “we” is new. The “we” has been the strangest part. I have been a one-woman operation my entire life—Marlowe and me, then just me—and now there’s a “we.” The “we” can’t talk back, but somehow, it’s already the loudest voice in every room I’m in.
I get up and dress carefully. Usually, I dress like a woman late for a horse, but this morning, I stand in front of my bag and pick the loose shirt, the one that drapes.
I tell myself it’s because it’s going to be warm today, which is a lie, and button it anyway.
Twenty weeks will show in jeans and a fitted tee.
Twenty weeks is making decisions about my wardrobe before I do.
I look in the little mirror over the dresser. Sun-bronzed, braid already escaping, my mother’s ring on my hand, hazel eyes that can’t decide if they’re green or brown in this light. I look like a woman who drove for hours and slept badly and has a secret the size of a person.
“Subtle,” I tell my reflection. “Real subtle, Gale.”
I smell coffee before I find the kitchen, which tells me I’m not the only one up early.
Maggie’s at the stove in a chenille robe with her hair in a braid, flipping something that smells like heaven, and she doesn’t even turn around. “Sit. Eat. You’re not going to argue with me about it because I already know you’re going to try, and I already know I’m going to win.”
I sit. A plate appears in front of me—eggs, biscuits, and a slab of ham.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say around a mouthful of biscuit I will think about for the rest of my life.
“No,” Maggie agrees, sliding a second biscuit onto my plate before I’ve finished the first. “But I enjoy feeding people.”
She finally looks at me. There’s no judgment on her face.
Only kindness. “I buried a husband on this ranch and then raised three boys. I know a woman who’s not sleeping when I see one.
Don’t need to know why. Just figured you could use a plate without anyone asking questions before seven in the morning. ”
“Thank you,” is all I trust myself to say.
“Don’t thank me, thank the chickens.” She points her spatula at me like a sentencing judge. “Now, go walk it off before Gabriel finds you and gets weird and silent at you, which, fair warning, is his love language.”
I’m laughing—the first real laugh in ages—as I head for the door.
The ranch at dawn is beautiful. With breakfast settling and Maggie’s orders to walk it off still ringing in my ears, I let myself wander.
This would be rude in most houses, but on a ranch, it’s practically expected—you find the coffee, walk the place, and learn where things are in roughly that order.
The air is cool, and the light is lifting over the ridge that no doubt gives the place its name—that hard line between green and gold that you only get in a county that has to fight for its water.
I go to the barn because horses make sense in a way people refuse to.
It’s a good barn. Clean, old, and well-kept.
The aisle is swept. The leather is oiled and hung where it belongs, not slung over a rail to crack in the weather.
There’s a coffee can of horehound drops on a shelf by the tack room and a radio that’s been tuned to a honky-tonk station.
I run my hand along the stall doors. The horses’ ears swivel as they decide about me. A big bay. A leggy gray. A stocky little buckskin who pins her ears just to keep her options open, and I like her immediately.
And then, in the corner stall, is a horse looking at me with one eye. The other eye looks as if it healed over long ago. He’s positioned himself on his good side at the bars to get a look at me, head cocked, ears forward, the friendliest expression I’ve seen on anything in days.
“Well, hi,” I say softly.
He nickers, low and hopeful. A real conversationalist.
A hand-lettered sign is zip-tied to his stall. CAPTAIN WINKY. And under it, smaller: He can see you fine.
I laugh out loud in the empty barn. “Captain Winky.” The gelding bobs his head like he’s proud of it. “That is the worst name I have ever heard, but I already love you, and I’ve known you for four seconds.”
He leans his whole head into my hands when I offer them, the trusting way that only happens with a horse who’s been treated right his whole one-eyed life.
I stand in the golden barn light, scratching a one-eyed gelding’s jaw, and for the first time in four months, the tightness in my chest unclenches a little.
I shift my weight without thinking, the small automatic adjustment I’ve started making to allow room for the curve. Six months ago, I could’ve spent an hour folded over a stall door and never felt it.
“He likes you.”
My heart flutters, but I don’t startle. I just keep scratching Captain Winky’s jaw and say without turning around, “It’s mutual.”
Gabriel comes up to the stall and leans against the door, a careful few feet of space between us.
He’s got a coffee in one hand. He hands it to me without a word.
Our fingers brush as I take it, just a graze of callus and heat, and the small contact travels straight up my arm like muscle memory.
I have to curl my free hand into a fist against my thigh so I don’t reach for more.
I take it. It’s decaf. I can tell from the first sip.
I look at him over the cup, and he looks back. He’s close enough that I catch the clean sweat-and-soap scent of him. My body remembers the weight of that chest against my back before my mind can stop it. Heat pools between my thighs. Not the time or the place, Evie.
“He came off a feedlot,” Gabriel says, nodding at the gelding. “Lost the eye before we got him. Nobody’d take him. Spooky, they said. Untrainable.”
“He’s not spooky.”
“No.” A pause. “He’s not.”
“Whoever said that just didn’t know how to come at him from the right side.” I scratch under the gelding’s forelock. “Horses aren’t broken. People come at them wrong and say it’s the horse’s fault.”
“That what you do?” he asks. “Come at them from the right side?”
“That’s the whole job now.” I take a sip of my coffee.
“Rehab. The ones nobody else can fix. People send me horses they’ve written off—bite, bolt, won’t load, won’t stand—and nine times out of ten the horse is fine and the human was the problem.
I just slow everything down until the horse believes me.
” I shrug. “It’s not magic. It’s patience and not lying to them. Horses always know when you’re lying.”
“Do they?”
“Every time.” I tip my head at Captain Winky, who’s gone heavy-lidded under my hand.
“Take this one. Somebody decided a one-eyed horse was a problem to be managed. They came at him from the blind side, spooked him, and called it proof. You don’t manage a horse like that.
You stand where he can see you, and you wait for him to decide you’re worth his trust. The difference is the person, not the horse. ”
Gabriel doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He looks at the one-eyed horse as if I’ve just told him something about himself, not the gelding.
“You’re a natural,” he finally says, which feels like a huge compliment coming from this man.
I huff a laugh. “Maybe. But I learned everything I know from my mom. She broke in colts the gentle way, long before anybody called it rehab and gave it a clinic price. People thought she was soft.” I huff.
“She wasn’t. She just figured out earlier than most that you can’t bully a thousand pounds into trusting you.
” I run my thumb down the gelding’s nose.
“When her interests changed, I kept going. Took the ones nobody wanted. The biters. The ones with a write-off slip already filled out.” I shrug carelessly, like it’s nothing.
“Turns out I’m real good with things everybody else gives up on. Don’t read too much into it.”
“Bit late for that.”
Gabriel’s gaze doesn’t leave my face. Not assessing. Just... looking. Like he thinks I’m worth understanding.
And somewhere along the way, I started thinking the same thing about him.