10. Epilogue 2
Cash
Four years later.
Lola is seven and she is, by any objective measurement, the most opinionated person in Wylde Mountain.
She reads chapter books now. Not Barnaby.
She’s graduated to what she calls “big girl books,” which are mostly about horses who solve mysteries, because my daughter believes that horses should have careers.
She still has the stuffed horse. He sits on her bed, one-eyed and threadbare, retired from active duty but still holding rank.
She still puts her boots on the wrong feet. Cassie gave up correcting her. I never started.
She starts every morning by telling me what she dreamed about. It’s always horses. Horses that fly. Horses that run bakeries. Horses that solve crimes. Her imagination is like Cassie’s and her stubbornness is mine and the combination is a force to be reckoned with.
We got married two years ago. Small ceremony on the ranch.
Raiford officiated because apparently that’s what Wylde ranch owners do.
Elise was there for Cassie. Beckett stood up for me because I asked and he said “fine” in a way that meant yes.
Jake cried. He does that at weddings. Caroline gave a toast that made everyone laugh.
Lola was the flower girl. She threw the petals directly at people’s faces instead of on the ground. I’ve never been prouder.
Cassie wore a dress that made me forget how to speak.
I wore a clean shirt and the boots Lola picked out.
Birdie watched from her stall. The old mare is twenty-four now and moves slower but still holds the barn together from the inside.
She nickered when we said our vows. Cassie says it was approval.
I say Birdie wanted a carrot. We’ve agreed to disagree.
Cassie’s parents love me. Her dad taught me to grill without treating it like an extreme sport.
Her mom knits Lola sweaters with horses on them.
We go to the ranch every other Sunday for pot roast and the chicken jokes that Cassie warned me about but that I genuinely find funny, which she says is proof that we belong together.
We live in the cabin. It’s not a guest cabin anymore. Raiford signed the deed over as a wedding gift, along with the twenty acres it sits on. “It was always yours,” he said. “The paperwork just caught up.” We expanded it slowly, adding two more bedrooms and another bathroom.
Cassie organized every inch of it. The bathrooms are labeled. The kitchen has a system. The bookshelves are arranged by genre, then author, then publication date. My contribution to the décor is a sock on the lamp that she pretends to be annoyed by but has never actually removed.
Lola’s room was the biggest project. Cassie painted a mural on one wall: Birdie standing in a field with a little girl in cowboy boots. The boots are on the wrong feet. It’s the best thing in the house.
I drive to the barn every morning. The cattle operation is mine. Raiford trusts me with it completely, which still catches me off guard some mornings.
But the youth program is the thing.
Wylde Ranch Youth Horsemanship. Saturdays, nine to noon.
Kids from the valley come to the ranch and learn to ride.
Just the fundamentals. How to approach a horse.
How to earn trust. How to sit in a saddle and feel the animal move under you and know that you’re part of something bigger than yourself.
I started it two years ago with Raiford’s money and Brynn’s help with the curriculum and my own stubborn belief that what I learned on the circuit could mean something off of it.
Brynn designed the progression from groundwork to riding.
Beckett contributed by saying “don’t let them fall” and leaving the room.
Raiford funded the insurance, the equipment, and three gentle horses suitable for beginners.
Sawyer Cross handles the safety protocols.
The grumpy vet shows up every month to check the program horses and stays longer than he needs to, which tells me he cares more than he’ll admit.
He’s good with the kids in his own way. He doesn’t smile at them, but he answers their questions about horses with a thoroughness that borders on lecturing, and the kids love it because kids can tell when an adult is taking them seriously.
Birdie is one of the program horses. At her age she is the slowest, most patient, most tolerant horse in Montana.
She walks the round pen at a pace that can only be described as philosophical.
The kids love her. Lola insists on being her primary rider, which Birdie allows with the resignation of a grandmother who has given up saying no.
There’s a boy named Mason who comes every Saturday. He started last year. Eight years old. Scared of everything. He cried the first session. The second session he touched a horse’s nose. By the fourth session he was sitting in the saddle for ten seconds before asking to get down.
Last Saturday he rode Birdie around the entire round pen. Twice. When he dismounted, he looked at me with eyes that were bright and terrified and proud.
“I did it,” he said.
“You did it, kid.”
“Can I come back next week?”
“Every week. As long as you want.”
He grinned. The grin of a kid who just discovered he’s braver than he thought. I know that grin. I’ve worn it. I wore it every time I climbed into a chute and every time I climbed out.
The eight seconds taught me how to hold on.
This teaches me something better. How to let go. How to stand at the fence and watch a scared kid find his courage on the back of a horse and know that I helped put him there. Not by doing the brave thing myself. By making the space where someone else could.
It’s a Saturday afternoon. The program just finished for the day. Eight kids, four horses, and approximately ten thousand questions about whether horses dream. (I said yes. Cassie said we don’t know for sure. Lola said Birdie dreams about carrots. Lola was probably right.)
I’m putting away the saddles when Cassie’s car pulls up. She gets out with a box in her arms and a smile on her face that I recognize. The smile that means something big.
“What’s in the box?” I ask.
She sets it on the fence post. Opens the flaps. Pulls out a book.
The cover is beautiful. A watercolor painting of a horse and a little girl in cowboy boots, both looking at the viewer with expressions of calm determination. The title: Barnaby and the Girl Who Was Brave.
“The hardcover edition,” she says. “First print run is already sold out.”
I take the book. I turn it over. The back has a photo of Cassie at the festival in Bozeman, signing books for a line of kids. The author bio says: Cassie Benton Wylde lives in Wylde Mountain, Montana, with her husband, her daughter, and a stuffed horse who still doesn’t like baths.
Lola appears from somewhere. She has dirt on her knees and hay in her hair and she is perfect.
“Is that my book?!”
“It’s your book,” Cassie says.
Lola grabs it. She opens to the first page. She reads the first sentence out loud, one finger tracking under the words: “Barnaby lived in a barn on a big ranch with a girl named Lily who wore her boots on the wrong feet.”
She looks up. “That’s me.”
“That’s you,” Cassie says. Her eyes are wet.
Lola goes back to reading. She sits down in the dirt, cross-legged, the book in her lap.
Birdie wanders to the fence and lowers her head and watches over Lola’s shoulder like she’s checking the illustrations for accuracy.
The old mare and the little girl have been inseparable since the day Lola first reached through the stall bars and said “horsey.” Four years later, the vocabulary has expanded but the bond hasn’t changed.
Birdie is Lola’s horse. Lola is Birdie’s girl.
The rest of us are just here to provide carrots.
I pull Cassie against me. She fits under my arm the way she’s fit since the day she crouched in a gravel driveway and handed my daughter her stuffed horse.
“You okay?” she asks.
“More than okay.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The one you make when you’re feeling something big and don’t want to say it out loud.”
She knows me. Every version. The charming one. The scared one. The one who drifted. The one who stayed.
“I’m thinking about eight seconds,” I say.
“The bull riding thing?”
“The everything thing.” I look at Lola reading in the dirt. At the barn behind us. At the mountains. At the woman under my arm. “I spent twelve years chasing those eight seconds. The rush. The proof that I mattered. And then I lost it and I thought the best part was over.”
“And?”
“And I was wrong.” I press a kiss to the top of her head.
“Because this is better. Not the eight seconds. Every second. Every morning. Every night. Every time Lola reads a book you wrote and sees herself in it. Every time a kid rides Birdie around the pen and looks at me like he just conquered the world. Every time I walk into a barn and know I’m not passing through. ”
Cassie is quiet for a moment. Then she looks up at me.
“That’s going in a book,” she says.
“Don’t you dare.”
“Too late. Already writing it in my head.”
“Cassie.”
“You married an author. This is what happens.”
Lola looks up from the dirt. “Daddy, the girl in this book is brave.”
“Just like you, baby girl.”
“Just like Cassie.”
I look at my wife. She’s crying. Smiling. Both.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just like Cassie.”
Lola goes back to reading. Birdie stands guard. The afternoon sun is warm on the mountains and somewhere on this ranch, Beckett is probably reorganizing a tack room and Brynn is probably telling him to stop.
But Cassie doesn’t move. She’s still standing at the fence with that smile. The one that means something big.
“There’s something else,” she says.
She reaches into the box and pulls out an envelope. Plain white. Sealed.
My heart rate picks up. “We got the results?”
“We got the results.” Her hand moves to her stomach. Rests there.
I take the envelope. I open it. I read the paper inside.
The grin that spreads across my face could power the entire town of Wylde Mountain.
I crouch down beside Lola. She looks up from the book, annoyed at the interruption.
“Lola. Baby girl.”
“What, Daddy? I’m reading.”
“You’re going to have a little brother.”
Her eyes go wide. The book drops to the dirt. She looks at me. She looks at Cassie. She looks at Cassie’s hand on her stomach.
Then she squeals. The kind of squeal that makes every horse in the barn lift its head. She jumps up and throws her arms around Cassie and bounces.
“A brOTHER! A BABY brOTHER!”
Then she stops. Wrinkles her nose.
“Boys are stinky,” she says. With absolute authority.
“Yes they are,” Cassie says. Looking at me. “But we love them anyway.”
I stand. I pull Cassie against me. I kiss her with the envelope still in my hand and Lola bouncing between our legs and the September sun warm on the mountains.
“A boy,” I say. Against her mouth.
“A boy.”
“Is he going to wear his boots on the wrong feet too?”
“Almost certainly.”
I hold her. My wife. The mother of my son. The woman who walked into my life with a tote bag and a camera and reorganized everything.
Lola tugs on my jeans. “Daddy. Can the baby ride Birdie?”
“When he’s big enough.”
“I’ll teach him.”
“I know you will.”
Lola picks up her book from the dirt, sits back down, and returns to reading as if she did not just receive life-altering news. She is my daughter in every way that matters.
I need this. All of it. The ordinary, permanent, built-from-scratch life of a man who stopped drifting and started choosing.
Not eight seconds.
Every second.
For the rest of my life.