Chapter 18
Ethan
The coffee is already made.
I stand in my kitchen at six in the morning with sleep still in my eyes and a cat on my foot, and the coffee is already made. Two mugs on the counter. The blue one Jenna picked out of the cabinet her second morning here and never put back is half empty. Steam curls from the second. Mine.
She beat me to it.
I’ve been making this woman coffee since she woke up on my couch with a leaf in her hair and terror in her eyes.
Every morning. I’ve been saying I love you in coffee grounds and filtered water for weeks, and this morning she said it back.
She woke up in our bed and came downstairs and measured the grounds and poured two mugs because that’s what people do when they live somewhere permanently.
Jenna is at the kitchen table with her laptop open, reading glasses on, hair tucked behind one ear, and one bare foot folded beneath her. The other is flat on the floor, pale toes on worn wood.
Last night the phone rang and Beckett said Vance was in custody and she pressed her forehead into my chest and said okay. Then she fell asleep on me like she had nothing left to carry.
Now here we are. Morning. Two mugs. The go-bag that sat by the bedroom door for her first two weeks is in the closet now, emptied and folded flat on the top shelf. I found it there three days ago and stood in the doorway for a full minute, not breathing.
She unpacked.
“Morning.” Jenna doesn’t look up as her fingers move across the keyboard.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
Pixel threads between my ankles. Crowley is a judgmental orange mass on the windowsill, one eye tracking a bird he’ll never catch. And on the table next to Jenna’s laptop, Bug and Glitch are staging a coordinated assault on a pen.
Bug gets a paw on it. Glitch bodychecks him. The pen goes off the table edge and hits the floor.
Jenna still doesn't look up from her screen. “Tweedle Dee, stop.”
Daniel appears in the doorway with a mug of coffee in his hand and takes in the scene: Jenna on the laptop, cats on the table, pen on the floor.
“Which one’s Tweedle Dee?”
I look at the kittens. Bug has decided now would be a good time to lick his ass. Glitch is watching Bug. They’re identical gray blurs of chaos, and I genuinely cannot tell them apart, not the way Jenna can.
“I have no idea.” I take a sip of coffee. “Jenna named them.”
The corner of Daniel’s mouth lifts. He leans against the doorframe beside me and finishes his coffee in four swallows. “Ride?”
I look at Jenna. She’s already waving us off without looking up, the gesture of a woman who knows that morning rides are how Sutton men have conversations they can’t have standing still.
“Go.” She pushes her glasses up. “I’ll be here.”
I'll be here. She says those three words like they cost nothing.
Gabriel is in the barn when we arrive, already saddled on Sable—the dark bay mare who tolerates no one else. His hat is low over his eyes, and his posture is composed in the way that Gabriel is composed: a man who built his walls young and maintains them with discipline.
His eyes flick to us, and his shoulders ease a fraction. Gabriel’s version of relief. “You’re late.”
“You’re early,” Daniel replies.
“Both true,” I say, and Gabriel’s mouth twitches.
We ride out along the eastern fence line, the three Stoneridge sons on horseback, the way we’ve been riding since we were old enough to hold reins.
The land opens around us, green hills rolling toward the ridge, morning light catching the creek along the south pasture.
This land is ours. Our grandfather’s and our father’s and ours.
The leather saddle creaks as Scout moves beneath me with an easy gait. The air smells like cut grass and morning dew and horse. The land, the sky, my brothers on either side of me. No screens, no perimeters, no crisis. Just hooves on dirt and three men who grew up on this ground.
“Family meeting follow-up,” Daniel says. “Ben reached out about combining the water infrastructure. Henry’s coordinating.”
I nod. “Henry’s good at that.”
“Maggie says Dad actually smiled last week,” Gabriel says. “She’s considering having it framed.”
All three of us grin. We ride in silence for a stretch. Hoofbeats and birdsong and saddle leather.
“Beckett’s got nothing on Voss yet,” Daniel says. “Vance isn’t talking.”
The name hangs in the air. Alexander Voss. A man none of us have met, whose shadow stretches over everything we’re building.
Gabriel shifts in the saddle. “Like Maggie always says, one storm at a time.”
“She's not wrong,” I reply. “Vance is in custody, the evidence is filed, and the ranch is standing. We’ll deal with the rest when it comes.”
Daniel nods.
“Your wife built a spreadsheet that predicts my calving dates,” he says after a minute.
“She built mine first.”
“It’s accurate.”
I smile. “I know.”
Gabriel grunts. “She color-coded the cattle rotation. Showed it to me yesterday. It’s terrifying and beautiful. Even Delaney was jealous.”
“She’s my force of nature.”
“Disgusting,” Gabriel says without heat.
“Deeply,” Daniel agrees.
The teasing dies back as we turn at the north boundary marker and the ranch spreads below us. I take in the house, the barns, the pastures, the porch where I proposed with a wire ring and my woman said yes.
Gabriel rides slightly ahead, not pulling away, just his natural position. The man who stands a half-step outside the circle because he positioned himself there so long ago that he’s forgotten it’s a choice.
I watch my youngest brother. The set of his shoulders, those mismatched eyes—Mom’s green in one, Sutton blue in the other. Our mother’s legacy written across his face every day, and it cost him in ways none of us have been able to fix.
He didn’t serve. Daniel was a decorated Army Ranger, and he still carries the discipline in his bones.
I had the steady hands and quiet focus necessary for ordnance.
Gabriel grew up in a house that was too quiet, a space where a mother should have been and a father who didn't know how to talk about why. Thank God for Maggie, who’s the closest thing to a mother he has.
My youngest brother is twenty-nine. He’s the bravest person I know, and he has no idea.
“Gabe.”
He glances back and tips his hat up. He looks like a man who’s bracing for a question or a concern.
“Good ride.”
That’s all I say. It’s not a fix or a speech.
I can’t absorb the weight of whatever he’s carrying.
I can’t hand him what Jenna handed me because that’s not mine to give.
Someone else will. Someone is going to walk into this man’s life and rearrange his heart.
But now that I have Jenna, I know what he's missing—and that’s a hard thing to carry for a brother.
His expression shifts, the guardedness easing into something that isn’t quite peace. But it’s a start.
“Yeah.” He turns back to the trail. “Good ride.”
The ranch comes into view around the last bend.
Jenna is on the porch, sitting in the wooden rocker with a mug in her hands and the laptop closed beside her. Pixel is nestled in her lap. Her hair is loose, and she’s looking out at the land as if she’s memorizing it.
I pull Scout to a stop and take it in. My whole world in one frame.
The ranch behind her, the pastures rolling out.
My wife, with coffee and a cat and a smile that starts when she sees me.
Not the careful one, calibrated to take up as little space as possible.
This smile doesn't calculate. It breaks across her face like she means it.
I dismount. Gabriel and Daniel ride past toward the barn, and I walk toward the porch. Unhurried. No emergency. No crisis to manage. Just a man walking toward my wife on a Tuesday morning because she’s there and I’m allowed to want this.
Jenna is three steps above me, looking down with the sun behind her. “Hey, cowboy.”
“Hey, sunshine.”
“Good ride?”
“Yeah.”
She tilts her head. “You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The one where you’re feeling something enormous and trying to fit it into one syllable.”
She knows me. The way I know her coffee temperature and her sleep sounds and the exact pressure point on her forearm where the flare calms under my thumb.
I climb the remaining steps and crouch beside the rocker, my hand on the armrest, my face level with hers. Pixel meows a complaint and resettles.
Jenna reaches out to trace my jaw, and her thumb finds the spot below my ear where my pulse is doing something unreasonable. “I made coffee.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to keep making coffee. Every morning. Even when you get up at five and try to beat me to it. Even when the Tweedles knock the filters off the counter.”
I turn my head and press my mouth against her palm, and her breath catches.
I don’t tell her she’s my whole world because I don't have to. She reads me the way she reads data, with patience and precision and an attention so fierce it feels like being held.
She leans forward and presses her forehead against mine. We stay there, two people on a porch in the morning sun, her hand in mine, the cat between us, the ranch around us doing what it's always done: standing.
I was the man who put himself last. Who hid behind usefulness until nobody remembered there was a man behind the function. I carried everything without complaint because that’s what I was for.
Then a woman drove through the night and crashed into a ditch on my property and whispered my name before she opened her eyes, and I carried her too. But she was the first thing I carried that carried me back.
This is what it looks like when a man lets someone love him.
Jenna pulls back. “Come inside. Your coffee’s getting cold.”
I follow my wife into our home. The screen door closes behind us.
Somewhere past the ridge is a storm with a name we haven’t learned yet. But today the sky is clear. Today there’s coffee and cats and brothers who ride beside me and a woman who smiles like she means it.
Today is enough. Today is everything.