3. Chapter Three
Chapter Three
CALEB
The pony is favoring her near-fore.
Noah noticed it first, the way Noah notices everything with the animals, quiet and certain.
He texted Ethan. Ethan texted me. The Ford’s timing chain was half done, and I didn’t want to come, but the text said new vet’s already here, and Ethan’s second text said be useful, so here I am, crossing the stable yard with grease still under my fingernails and Bear trotting at my heels.
The trekking pony, Birdie, is tied at the rail outside the lower barn. He’s a gray, fourteen hands, steady temperament. Good with kids. Noah uses him for the beginner treks. He’s standing with his weight shifted off the left front, ears flat, unhappy.
Ethan is by the rail with his arms folded, hat pulled low against the morning sun.
Noah is crouched near Birdie’s head, one hand on his neck, murmuring.
And there’s someone at his leg. A woman, crouched low, her back to me, hands running down the cannon bone with enough confidence to suggest she’s done this a thousand times.
Blonde hair pulled back in a knot. Petite. Flannel, cut-offs, work boots scuffed at the toe. A canvas bag lies open on the ground beside her, with instruments laid out in a neat line.
The new vet.
Bear and I stop at the same time.
“Inflammation around the fetlock,” the woman says, not looking up.
Her voice is calm, focused, directed at the horse and at nobody else.
“It’s not the shoe. The shoe’s fine. He’s got some heat in the joint.
Could be a minor strain.” Her thumb runs along the tendon, slow and methodical.
“I want to flex-test him. Walk him out for me?”
Noah straightens and unties the lead rope.
The woman stands.
She turns around.
And the ground goes out from under me.
Regan.
Regan.
The face I haven’t seen in ten years. The face that used to be the first thing I looked for in every room I walked into and the last thing behind my eyelids before sleep.
She’s older. Finer-boned. The baby softness has gone from her jaw, replaced by angles I don’t recognize.
Her hair is lighter than it was, or the light is different, or I’m wrong about everything because my brain has just come apart at the seams.
She’s grown into the girl I remember. Not grown up. Grown into. The promise of her at seventeen filled in by the woman standing in front of me now, and the sight of it hits like a fist landing on bone.
And it’s not just my chest that reacts.
It’s lower than that. Older. The pull I tried to drill out of myself in basic and two tours and ten years of silence, still wired straight to her.
Ten seconds in the same yard and my body’s already a traitor.
She hasn’t seen me yet. She’s talking to Ethan about the flex test, about angles, about watching for asymmetry in the trot. Professional. Composed. Her hands aren’t shaking.
Mine are.
They go in my pockets. Tight fists, knuckles white, hidden.
Noah walks Birdie out in a straight line, twenty yards and back, easy trot.
The pony moves well, with a slight hesitation on the turn, but nothing dramatic.
Regan watches with her arms folded, head tilted, eyes tracking the gait the way I track an engine.
Reading it. Looking for the thing that’s off.
She still does that. The tilt of the head.
The narrowed focus. She used to do it in school, crouched over textbooks in the library, her coffee going cold beside her, completely gone into whatever she was studying.
I used to watch her from across the room and think, that. I want that focus turned on me.
It was.
And then it wasn’t.
“Mild strain,” she says to Ethan. “Rest him for a week. Cold-hose the fetlock twice a day for twenty minutes. I’ll come back on Friday to check.” A card comes out of her back pocket. She holds it out. “My cell’s on there. Call if he gets worse before then.”
Ethan takes the card. “Appreciate it. You settling in okay?”
“Getting there.” She smiles. It’s a professional smile that sits on her face like armor. It’s a good one. Convincing. Most people wouldn’t see through it.
I’m not most people.
Don’t.
“This is my cousin,” Ethan says, turning. “Caleb. He lives out on the edge of the property.”
She looks past Ethan. Her eyes find me.
The smile drops.
Not all at once. It goes in stages. The mouth first. Then the eyes.
Then the color, draining from her face like someone pulled a plug.
Her hand, the one holding the card, drops to her side.
The professional composure cracks down the center and underneath it, she looks exactly the way she looked the last night I saw her, searching a hall for me in panic as I watched from the shadows.
Scared. Guilty. And so beautiful it makes me sick.
Her lips part.
“Caleb.”
My name on her lips. After ten years of silence.
I don’t say hers.
I give her a nod that says nothing, then turn to Ethan. “Anything else?”
Ethan frowns. He’s clocked the temperature change. Ethan clocks everything, then tucks it away to bring up later when you least want him to. It’s one of his most annoying traits. “No. We’re good. Thanks for coming over.”
“Yep.”
I turn and walk away at a steady pace, hands still buried in my pockets.
Bear falls into step beside me. Regan’s watching me go.
Ethan’s watching me go. Noah’s quiet attention is tracking the whole thing from his position by the pony, and Noah sees more than Ethan, always has, just does less with it.
Every step is deliberate and measured. The way I walk when I’m holding something together that wants to fly apart.
Twenty yards to the gate.
Fifteen.
Ten.
“It was nice to meet you,” she calls. Her voice cracks on the last word. Barely. Just enough for me to hear it.
Nice to meet you. Like we’re strangers. Like she didn’t keep a toothbrush at my mom’s place. Like she didn’t use to fall asleep with her hand on my chest, counting my heartbeats because she said it was better than counting sheep.
My left hand comes out of my pocket. A gesture between a wave and a dismissal and neither, because it’s just me trying to get my hand to do anything other than shake.
Through the gate. Down the track. Past the treeline, where the stable yard disappears behind the pines and I can stop pretending I’m made of stone.
The pretending stops.
Bear sits at my feet, presses his side against my leg, and waits.
When my hands come out of my pockets, they’re trembling, the way they used to tremble in the first year after I came home, before the work and the routine and the careful architecture of this life ground it out of me.
Regan.
Regan is the new vet. She’s here, in Wild Briar Creek, in the stable yard, with her hands on my family’s horse and her professional smile and her voice saying my name like she still has any right to say it.
It’s been ten years since prom night. Since Drew put his phone in my hand and the picture on the screen blew a hole through every plan I’d ever made.
I can still see it. The parking lot outside the gym.
The bass thumping through the walls. Regan, in the arms of a man who wasn’t me.
Her face turned into his neck. His hands on her back.
Grainy and dark and damning, and I looked at it and every fear I’d ever carried landed at once.
That good things don’t last. That people leave.
That love is just another word for the thing that wrecks you.
I didn’t ask her. I didn’t confront her. I didn’t go out to the parking lot and tap the guy on the shoulder and say, Who the fuck are you?
I left.
By morning, I was at the recruiting office.
By the end of the week, I was gone. Two tours.
The things I saw over there. The things I did.
And underneath all of it, holding me together and tearing me apart at the same time, the photo.
Transferred from phone to phone. Proof. Armor.
The thing I looked at when the doubt crept in, when part of my brain tried to whisper that I should have asked, should have stayed, should have given her one chance to explain.
The photo shut that voice up every time.
She tried to find me. I know that. The calls, the texts, the voicemails I never listened to. Her mom called my mom, and my mom didn’t have answers because I hadn’t given her any. I vanished. Clean. Complete. The way they teach you in basic, except I’d already been practicing.
I gave her ten years of silence. Built the clearing, the Airstream, the workshop.
Built a life that needed nobody, that was enough because it had to be, because I made it enough, because the alternative was admitting that the only person I ever loved had thrown me away for someone in a dark parking lot.
And she’s here.
Standing in a stable yard in Tennessee, talking about fetlock inflammation, smiling at my cousin, and I’m supposed to be okay with that. I’m supposed to nod and wave and walk away and go back to the clearing and pick up the timing chain and let the engine fill my hands and empty my head.
My phone comes out of my pocket. The thumb swipes before I can stop it. Past screenshots and parts lists and one picture of Bear sleeping in the workshop doorway. Down to the folder at the bottom, the one with no name.
The photo. Drew’s photo. Grainy, dark, ten years old. Her arms around him. His arms around her. You can’t see his face. You can see hers, just barely, turned against his chest, and that’s enough. That’s been enough for a decade.
I’ve looked at this photo more times than I’ll ever tell anyone. In the dark of the Airstream. At three in the morning, when the nightmares come. On the days when the box I keep everything in starts to rattle and I need to see the proof to remember why it stays shut.
Bear whines, low and barely audible, and pushes his head under my hand. I let him. My fingers find the scruff behind his ears and I stand there in the trees with my dog pressed against my leg and my hands finally, slowly, going still.
The stable yard is silent behind the pines.
She’ll be packing her bag by now. Clicking the clasps on her instruments.
Saying something polite to Ethan, something professional to Noah.
Getting in her truck. Driving back to the clinic, where she’ll close the door and probably fall apart the same way I’m falling apart, except she’ll do it louder and I’ll do it here, where nobody sees.
Good.
The clearing is five minutes away. The workbench is waiting. The Ford’s timing chain is half done.
So I walk and Bear walks with me, never leaving my side.