16. Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
REGAN
The bay mare tries to take my finger off on the second vaccination.
That’s fine. That’s good, actually. I need something to think about that isn’t the man whose clearing I can see from the trekking yard if I look west through the treeline.
I keep my hand on the bay’s neck and let her settle, which she does in her own time, because horses don’t care about your schedule.
Five more ponies after this one. Tetanus boosters, flu shots, a general once-over for anything the season’s beaten into them.
Routine. Professional. Caleb-adjacent by geography only.
I’m fine. I’m so fine.
If I were any more fine, I’d burst into flames.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket. Tyler. I let it go to voicemail because if I hear my brother’s voice right now, I’ll tell him everything, and I’m not ready for that. Tyler being gentle means it’s real. Real means I have to do something about it.
The trekking yard sits on the east side of the ranch, past the main paddocks, a dirt pen with a weathered rail fence, a tack shed, and a mounting block worn smooth.
The mornings have started to go cool. Mist on the treeline and the hickories turning, gold eating into green, September getting serious about being over.
A dozen starlings on the shed roof shuffle and complain.
Somewhere up at the big house, a screen door bangs shut.
“Excuse me. Do you remember me?”
I look down. Mason Callahan is standing at the rail with his arms folded and a look on his face that means business. Six years old and certain of everything.
“Of course I remember you. How’s the kitten?”
“Good. But Peanut is nervous, and I need you to know you have to go slow. She’s sensitive.”
“Noted. Which one is Peanut?”
Mason points at a squat Shetland pony who has been adored past any hope of dignity. “She’s mine. Well. She’s Dad’s. But she’s mine.”
“She looks tough.”
“She is. I trained her.” Mason considers me. “You’ve been looking after Bear, right? Caleb’s dog?”
My hands keep moving on the bay. “I have.”
“Bear doesn’t like people. But he likes you. Caleb says you’ve got good hands.” He frowns. “I think it’s because you smell like animals. That’s a compliment.”
I don’t know what to do with the information that Caleb has said anything about me to anyone, let alone that I have good hands, so I do what I always do when I’m caught off guard. I work.
“Let’s get Peanut done next. You want to hold her rope?”
Mason holds the rope with both fists and a gravity that makes my throat tight, and when the needle goes in and Peanut stands dead still, Mason turns to Noah, who’s been propped on the rail watching all of this without a word, and says, “See? She’s really good.”
“I see,” Noah says.
Josie comes down from the big house with Grace partway through the fourth pony. She’s carrying two coffees, and Grace is carrying a boot. Not wearing it. Carrying it, in one hand, like a handbag.
“Just the one today,” Josie says, handing me a mug. “She took it off in the kitchen, and now it’s a fashion statement.”
“That’s a power move.”
“Grace is all power moves.” Josie sits on the mounting block with Grace in her lap, watching me work. She’s got an air of competence, like she used to run rooms. Nashville events planner marries the grumpiest cowboy in Tennessee. No regrets visible from here.
“Jack says you fixed Prospect’s abscess in half the time Doc Henley would’ve taken,” she says. “That mare doesn’t trust anybody.”
“Horses are easy. You just have to listen.”
“People could learn from that.”
She says it lightly, but she means it, and I catch her watching me with something careful in her expression, a question she’s too polite to ask out loud. I change the subject to tetanus and let it go.
This is how the Callahans get you. They don’t push. They just set a place at the table and wait, and before you’ve decided whether you’re staying, you’re already sitting down.
Noah takes the mug from my hands when I’ve drained it. He’s quiet a long time, long enough that I think we’re done. Then he says, “Mason asked me if you’d be coming around more.”
“I’ll be here for Bear’s appointments.”
“That’s not what he meant.” He picks up the rope. “He meant like family. Quinn’s keen to have you round for dinner one night too.”
I rinse the syringes and pretend my eyes aren’t stinging.
Here’s what I know about myself at twenty-seven. I’m excellent at my job, I’m terrible at being left, and I’ve spent ten years making sure no place feels permanent enough to miss if I have to go. New town, new practice, no roots deep enough to hurt when they rip up.
And now a six-year-old is holding a pony’s lead rope for me, and his aunt is handing me coffee, and there’s a baby waving a boot in the September sun, and I can feel the roots going in.
Noah straightens up from the rail. I don’t see what he sees. I feel it. My neck goes warm. My fingers stop on the pony’s flank.
Then I hear the boots on gravel, and I don’t have to turn because my body has already angled itself toward the sound, and I’m going to need a very serious talk with my body later about which way it’s supposed to be pointing.
Caleb rounds the tack shed with a gate latch in one hand. He stops when he sees me. His eyes go over the yard. The ponies, the cooler, Josie, Mason, me. I’m last on the list. I notice the order.
I notice everything about this man. I can’t make myself stop.
“Gate hinge,” he says to Noah. He holds up the latch.
“About time,” Noah says.
Caleb nods. He doesn’t look at me again. He doesn’t have to. The not-looking is louder.
He walks to the far gate and crouches to work the hinge. I go back to the ponies. The yard has halved in size.
“Oh, this is great,” says Luke, appearing on the fence like he was summoned by the charge in the air. “This is my favorite thing.”
“What’s your favorite thing?” Noah asks with a roll of his eyes.
“This.” Luke gestures at the yard. Me with a syringe, Caleb with a latch, and about forty feet of air between us doing none of the work air is supposed to do. “The restraint. The professionalism. Very convincing.”
“I’m doing vaccinations,” I say.
“I’m fixing a gate,” Caleb says, not looking up.
Both at once. Both too fast. Luke puts his hand over his heart.
“Beautiful,” he says. “Noah, are you seeing this?”
“I’m seeing a gate that needs a hinge,” Noah says, and I want to hug him.
Josie is suddenly very busy adjusting Grace’s one boot. Mason, who has missed every subtext in the yard, tugs my sleeve. “Can we do the last pony now?”
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s do that.”
I finish the last pony with my face burning and my hands steady, because hands are the one thing I can always rely on. Luke catches me on the way back to the cooler. The teasing is gone from his face.
“I give him grief,” he says, quiet. “That’s how we work. But, Regan.” He drops his voice. “He fixed that gate in March. There was nothing wrong with it.”
He walks off before I can answer. I stand there holding an empty syringe and try very hard not to look at the man kneeling by a gate he already fixed five months ago.
Goodbyes take longer than they should. Callahans don’t let you leave clean.
Mason makes me promise to come back for Sir Patches’s next appointment.
Josie squeezes my arm. Grace waves the boot, which I choose to interpret as progress.
Noah takes the mug and reminds me about Quinn’s dinner invitation.
My truck is where I left it. So is Caleb.
He’s leaning against the bed, wiping latch grease off his hands with a rag, studying the ground between his boots. He looks up when my boots hit the gravel.
“You always said you’d do this,” he says.
I go still. It’s so quiet I can hear the starlings on the shed roof. He’s not looking at me. He’s turning the rag over in his hands.
“When we were teenagers,” he says. “You told me you wanted a practice in a town small enough to know every animal by name. Gum boots, a truck and a field with ponies in it.”
My throat closes. Nobody has done this. Not in ten years. Not Tyler, not my parents, not any of the decent, kind, forgettable men I’ve dated since. Nobody has looked at me standing in a dirty yard with a cooler full of used needles and said, you did it. You became her.
“I did,” I say. My voice holds. My hands don’t.
“Yeah.” He looks at me then, full, unguarded, and through a gap in whatever he’s built around himself, I can see the boy who told me he wanted to marry me before either of us understood what that meant. “You did.”
He steps back.
“Drive safe,” he says, and the gap closes, and he turns toward the workshop track, and I watch him go until the treeline takes him.
I get in the truck. I put it in gear. I won’t cry.
I make it to the county road before I break that promise, which I consider a personal best.
He remembers. What I wanted at seventeen, he never let go of it.
I’m falling. I’ve been falling since the stable yard in August, since he looked at me like I’d wrecked him, since I could see he’d been wrecked long before I got there. I don’t know how to stop it, and I don’t know if the ground is going to catch me or break me.