Saving The Broken Country Star (The Nashville Hearts #2)

1. The Feed Chart

The Feed Chart

ANGEL

Sycamore Ridge - Morning

T he thing about a feed chart is that it does not care who you are.

I’m at the supply board inside Sycamore Ridge’s main barn on a Tuesday morning in late October, clipboard angled toward the light coming through the east-facing window.

I’m working through the morning schedule with the focused efficiency of someone who has done this a thousand times and intends to do it a thousand more.

Dulcie needs her joint supplement added back in. Ivy flagged it on Friday, and I flagged it again in the weekend log, and I am flagging it now in my own handwriting so it cannot be missed a third time.

Emmett is due for his feet. The new program participant is booked for nine o’clock, which means session prep starts at eight-thirty, which means it is currently ten past eight, and I have exactly twenty minutes before I need to have the south paddock ready.

The barn smells of hay and leather and the warmth of living animals, undercut by something cold and clean from the open doors at both ends.

It is my favorite smell in the world, and I have never told anyone that, because it is the kind of detail people feel they need to respond to, and I don’t generally need a response.

I do not look up when I hear the truck.

It pulls in off the county road with the specific crunch of gravel that distinguishes a heavy-duty pickup from a sedan, and I hear the door open and close with the solid economy of someone who doesn’t slam things. Note it, file it, go back to Dulcie’s supplement. I am not finished with the chart.

I am still not finished when the boots come through the barn door.

I know the sound of a man who expects to be received.

There is a quality to it: an absence of uncertainty in the step, the ease of someone who has arrived at a great many places and has not once, not known what to do when he got there.

I have heard that walk before, in a dining room in Nashville four months ago, when Hayes Sterling stood up from the table and said, “Cash, there you are,” with the warmth of a man welcoming someone he’s been waiting on, and everyone at the table adjusted slightly, how people do when a room changes.

I did not adjust. I was sitting between Ivy and the window, and I noted Cash Wilder, thoroughly and without ceremony, and went back to my dinner.

I do the same thing now.

He is tall, like a man built by outdoor work rather than a gym, broad through the shoulders, and unhurried in how he takes up space. Dark hair, the hat pulled low. The kind of man who looks like he was made for open land and has spent years pretending otherwise.

“You’re early,” I say, without looking up from the clipboard. “The horses aren’t ready for you yet.”

A pause. The kind that comes from a sentence landing wrong, or rather landing in a way no sentence has landed in a while, without any management attached to it, without anyone glancing sideways to check whether the reaction is okay.

I point at the bench near the barn door without turning around. “There’s coffee in the office if you need it. First door past the tack room. Horses will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”

I hear him settle onto the bench. Not sit. Settle. The particular sound of someone who has decided to do the thing they’ve been told without being entirely sure why.

I go back to the chart.

* * *

I have known Cash Wilder was coming for eight weeks.

Not because anyone made a formal announcement.

Ivy doesn’t run the program that way, doesn’t treat incoming participants like events to be prepared for, but because Hayes Sterling called Ivy on a Thursday evening in September.

I was in the office filing intake forms when she took the call, and Ivy has the particular quality of not leaving the room during phone conversations, so I heard most of it.

“He needs somewhere that isn’t the stage,” Hayes said. “He won’t say that. He’ll say the label suggested it. But he hasn’t written in four months, and he’s the kind of man who won’t admit something’s wrong until the floor comes up to meet him.”

Ivy was quiet.

Then: “When can he start?”

She told me the following Monday morning, over coffee in her kitchen, before the barn day started. This is one of the program's rituals that I have come to understand is not incidental. Ivy runs the program by running herself and her people first.

“Cash Wilder starts the twenty-second,” she said, both hands around her mug, looking at the window and the fields beyond it. “He’s booked for sixteen sessions. Hayes set it up. They go back a long way. Texas.”

She said the last word like people say it when they mean before all of this, when they mean the iteration of a person that only one or two people still know. “He’ll come in resistant. He usually charms his way through resistance, so we probably won’t see the actual resistance for a few sessions.”

“What’s the presenting issue?”

“Creative block. Four months without writing.” Ivy looked at me then. “He’d probably characterize it differently. He’d probably call it a rough patch.”

I nodded and drank my coffee.

I didn’t mention that I’d already met him. She didn’t, either.

It seemed irrelevant. We’d been at the same dinner table for two hours in June, a restaurant in Nashville, the kind of place Hayes picks when he wants a quiet corner and good food. Cash Wilder arrived forty minutes late with a story about a traffic stop on I-40 that had the whole table going.

He was exactly what I’d expected from the little I knew: tall, broad, the specific weathered ease of someone who grew up outdoors and spent his adult life in front of crowds, performing warmth so naturally it almost passed for the real thing.

Brown hair, a tad too long, with those green eyes that missed nothing.

Almost too good-looking.

Almost.

I watched him across the table the way I watch new horses in the paddock, not to catch him at something, just to understand the shape of him. He was generous with the room.

He had a laugh that arrived on time and departed cleanly. He asked Hayes questions about the Sterling property expansion and listened to the answers with what appeared to be genuine interest.

When Ivy introduced me, “This is Angel; she’s been with me since we started, and I’d be lost without her”, Cash turned and gave me a smile that has probably worked on a significant percentage of the population and said, “Good to meet you.”

I said “You, too,” and meant it precisely as much as the moment required.

He does not recognize me when he walks through the barn door this morning. I can see it in the brief recalibration of his expression when I speak, not recognition, just the adjustment of someone being processed in a new context. I don’t say anything about it.

It’s fine. We met in a social context in a restaurant. This is an entirely different context, and I am the one with the clipboard.

* * *

Ivy arrives at eight-fifty with her program folder and a second cup of coffee, which she hands to me without comment, which is the kind of efficiency I have come to understand as affection.

She is still in her barn clothes, her Strawberry blonde hair pulled back, her blue eyes already doing the inventory she does every morning before the day starts.

She is taking in the horses, the paddock, the bench near the door where Cash Wilder sits with his hat low and his coffee untouched.

“He’s on the bench,” I say.

Ivy glances toward the barn door. “How’s he presenting?”

“Prompt. Controlled. He’s done the performance warmth about twice since he sat down.” I pause. “He blinked when I pointed him to the bench.”

The corner of Ivy’s mouth moves. “Good.” She opens her folder and scans the intake notes.

“Kit’s confirmed for nine-fifteen. I’ll do the program overview with him first, then you can bring Dulcie out.

” She looks up. “Keep Emmett in the east paddock, but leave the gate adjacent. Let him make his own choices.”

I write this on the edge of the session sheet. “You think he’ll go to Cash?”

“I think Emmett’s going to find that man interesting,” Ivy says, in the tone she uses when she has a clinical instinct she isn’t ready to call a prediction. “Whether Cash finds that interesting back is the whole question.”

She goes to collect the participant, and I go to get Dulcie.

* * *

The session begins with a man who has decided to be cooperative.

I have learned to read the varieties of cooperation over the past year of this work.

There is genuine openness, which is rare, and usually found in participants who have hit a wall hard enough that the pride is gone.

There is managed compliance, the most common kind, with people going through the motions with the controlled surface of someone who has decided to do the minimum required and see what happens.

And there is performed willingness, which is its own category entirely: people who have enough social facility to perform engagement without engaging, whose warmth comes out like a professional tool because it has always worked before. They have no reason to believe it won’t work now.

Cash Wilder is in the third category, and he is very good at it.

I watch from the fence rail with my tablet and session notes, recording what Kit asks and what Cash answers, noting the quality of the pauses, too brief, too controlled, the answer already assembled before the question finishes.

He stands in the paddock with Dulcie.

Kit runs the hands-on sessions, has been doing natural horsemanship work for twenty years, and has the patience of someone who has never once needed a horse to like her faster than it wants to.

Cash takes his position in the center of the paddock with the ease of someone who has done this before. Not this, exactly, but something like it. I note the set of his shoulders, the angle of his boots in the dirt.

He is good with the horse.