Chapter 9
Jenna
My skin is calm.
For the first time in a long while, the patches on my forearms aren’t screaming. They’re a calmer pink instead of an angry red, with less raised edges, and the heat beneath them has subsided.
I’ve only been here for three days, yet I’m already sleeping full nights, heavy and dreamless, in a bed that smells like cedar and unscented soap.
Maggie never asks if I’m hungry; she simply places a plate down.
I eat her home-cooked food as if someone might walk in and take it back.
Halfway through every meal, I catch myself with my shoulders up, elbows close to the plate, resembling a kid who learned early that food wasn’t guaranteed.
I make myself slow down but mostly fail.
I’m drinking water because a glass appears next to my elbow every hour, and I never see him pour it.
My body is responding to safety before my mind will admit what’s happening, flourishing and filling out. Nothing major, just a new plumpness beneath my skin, as if my body has decided, without consulting me, that it’s finally safe to take up space.
Every morning, I wake up and run the calculation: if something is this good, the cost is coming. And every morning, the catch doesn’t arrive.
This morning, Ethan is teaching me to ride.
Specifically, he’s teaching me how not to fall off a one-eyed horse named Captain Winky, who is allegedly the calmest mare on Stoneridge and has, in the last twenty minutes, tried to eat my hair and refused to move in any direction except toward the feed bucket.
“Heels down.” Ethan’s voice comes from my left. “Lean back a little. You're gripping with your knees.”
“I’m gripping with everything I have.” My fingers are white around the saddle horn. “He hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you. He’s testing you.” His hand finds my hip.
The contact shoots through the denim and into my bones, and I remind myself that this is instruction, not—
His thumb shifts. One inch. The pad presses into the hollow above my hip bone, and the instructional argument falls apart because no riding teacher in history has ever touched someone like that.
“Relax your seat.” His voice is closer now, lower. “Trust him.”
With his thumb pressing into my hip like that, the last thing I’m thinking about is the horse.
Captain Winky takes three steps forward. I grip Ethan's shoulder where the muscle meets his neck, and my fingers linger longer than balance requires. He doesn’t move my hand. He stands there with my hand on his shoulder and his hand on my hip while the whole ranch goes about its business.
“I think Captain Winky and I have reached an understanding,” I say breathlessly. “He walks toward food. I hold on. Everyone survives.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. It’s not quite a smile, but the almost-version he gives me when he’s trying not to laugh. “You’re a natural.”
“You are a liar, Ethan Sutton.”
He lifts me down, his hands spanning my waist as I slide against him, chest to chest for half a second, the flannel warm against my palms. He smells like coffee and hay dust. My feet hit the ground, but his hands remain.
“We’re going to Havenridge this afternoon.” His voice is conversational, while his thumbs make small, distracting circles at my waist. “Shay’s been asking to meet you. The wives want to get together.”
The wives. The other branch of the family. My stomach tightens.
“Meet me or inspect me?”
He reads the fear beneath my joke. His forehead tips against mine. “Both. You’ll like them. Shay’s already planning to feed you.”
“If I eat any more, I’ll be the size of this ranch.”
“Good.”
His palm slides from my waist to my cheekbone, which used to be sharp enough to cut. His thumb traces the soft new curve of it like he's been cataloguing the change. Maybe he has.
“You’ve started filling back in.” His voice drops to a low, private tone. “Your face. Your hips. The hollow under your collarbone.” His hand returns to my waist and settles there, firmer now. Possessive. “I noticed the first morning. I’ve been watching it happen.”
“You like it?”
“I like it.” His mouth brushes my temple. “I like seeing you well.”
My chest does something complicated. No one has ever looked at my body and said more instead of less.
The drive to Havenridge takes twenty minutes. Ethan’s truck smells like weathered leather and coffee. His hand finds mine across the console, lacing our fingers together.
Through the windshield, the landscape opens. Rolling green is cut by fences and creek beds, two ranches sharing the same valley and the same water table that a corporation wants to bleed dry. To them, it’s just land, not people’s homes.
“Henry’s the eldest,” Ethan says, his thumb running along the length of my index finger. “Ben’s son. He and Shay were the first of Marlie’s matches, and they have baby Max now.” He pauses. “Henry doesn’t talk much.”
“Runs in the family.”
My comment prompts that almost-smile again. “He’ll size you up. Don’t take it personally. His nod is a whole conversation.”
I watch the road uncoil ahead. My free hand finds the hem of my sleeve and tugs in a reflex older than any progress my skin has made. I’m about to walk into a house full of women who married into this family and became a unit. Women who belong somewhere.
I’ve never belonged anywhere.
Ethan squeezes my hand but doesn’t say anything. One touch from him is like a whole sentence.
The main house at Havenridge is warm. That’s what I notice first. Not the size or layout, but the layered warmth that envelops me when the front door opens.
I catch the scent of cinnamon from the kitchen, the sweet-sour smell of baby things, and the woody undertone of a house loved into its shape.
Tiny boots by the door sit next to enormous ones.
Henry Sutton fills the doorway like he was poured into it.
He’s large. Not just tall but dense. Built like the ranch, permanent and immovable. Dark hair, serious silver eyes, a jaw set in quiet assessment. He looks at Ethan first, and a glance passes between them, loaded with a cousin’s shorthand I can’t read.
Then his gaze shifts to me.
I straighten, the foster kid at the new house, standing taller so they’ll think I’m worth keeping.
Henry takes in my glasses, my bitten nails, the sleeves I’ve pulled to my wrists. I feel like a file being read.
Then Henry nods as if he’s already decided. He steps aside, and the warmth of the house swallows me whole.
“Shay’s in the kitchen,” he says in a deep voice that sounds as if it’s used sparingly, like a resource he’s careful not to waste. “Coffee’s on.”
That’s it. Two sentences. That nod at me in the doorway was the whole welcome speech. The gruffest Sutton saying, “You’re in.”
Ethan’s palm presses into my lower back.
“I’m going to check in with Tom and Angus.
I won’t be far.” His lips brush my temple.
Then he’s gone, leaving me standing there with the faint warmth of his mouth still on my skin.
He walked me in, made sure I was settled, delivered me to people who will take care of me, and stepped back.
The kitchen is chaos, and I love it immediately.
Shay has red hair and freckles, and her energy fills the room before she even speaks. She’s pulling something from the oven while talking over her shoulder to a blonde-haired woman, who’s arranging glass jars on the counter. Baby Max is in a bouncer on the floor, gnawing a wooden ring.
Henry appears behind me, lifts Max out one-handed, and disappears into the living room.
“You must be Jenna.” Shay sets the tray down and turns the full beam of her attention on me. It’s like standing in sunlight. “Sit. Eat. Ethan said you like coffee, but I made tea too because Kitty only drinks tea, and I figured more options, right?”
She puts a plate in front of me before I’ve fully sat down. Warm scones. Butter already on the side.
My hands shake as I take the plate, which is absurd. It’s food, it’s a scone, it’s a woman being kind in a kitchen. But nobody checked if I’d earned it. Shay handed me a plate as if feeding a stranger is what you do, and the simplicity of it crashes into my heart and rests there.
“Thank you. This is really kind of you.”
Shay waves a hand. “Kind, nothing. I made four dozen. Henry ate twelve before 9 a.m.”
Shay introduces the blonde-haired woman as Luna. She smiles, her expression quieter than Shay’s but just as warm.
Delaney comes through the back door, snatches a scone, and slides into the chair next to mine.
Within thirty seconds, she’s checked whether I need anything from town, confirmed that Maggie knows we’re here for dinner, and texted someone about something I can’t follow.
The woman coordinates as if it’s second nature.
“How are you settling in?” Luna asks, moving to sit beside me.
“Getting there.” My standard answer. Safe. Noncommittal.
She nods as if she hears what I’m not saying. “I grew up in the system too.”
My eyes widen.
She says it without ceremony, without the careful framing people use when they want you to know they understand. She says it the way you say it to someone who’ll know exactly what it means: quickly, factually, and without requiring a response.
“The first few weeks are the hardest,” she continues, her voice low enough that it’s just for me.
“Your brain keeps running the math. How long before the catch? How long before someone changes their mind?” She picks up her tea.
“The math never comes out right here. These people don't work that way.”
My throat tightens. “How long before you stopped counting?”
She thinks about it. Really thinks, not the polite pause of someone performing empathy. “I’ll let you know when I do.” A small, honest smile. “But the intervals get longer. And the man helps.”
My throat works. I look away, down at the scone, at my hands wrapped around the plate. She said it so simply, as if arriving at a ranch terrified and broken is a stage you pass through, and there’s an after.