Lucas
Ihadn’t almost died.
That was the lie my brain kept circling, trying to land on something solid. I told myself it had been close, sure, but not real. Not serious. But it lodged somewhere under my ribs and refused to leave.
I didn’t know this ranch. Not really. I knew the numbers, the acreage, the asset sheets I’d memorized late at night when sleep wouldn’t come.
I’d learned how to measure land and reduce it to a figure that fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
What I didn’t know was how fast the ground could give way, how quiet danger could be, how easy it was to trust the wrong thing because you wanted a better look.
Almost dying did that to you. It made you pause.
I’d fucked up with Jesse, and there was no way around that.
We were ghosts in the same house again. He was avoiding me outright, and I caught him long enough to open my mouth before he looked straight through me as if I were nothing and walked away.
At first, my temper fought my guilt—I told myself he was being unreasonable, stubborn, territorial.
Then, the temper burned off, and all that was left was guilt.
After that came something worse. Sadness.
He wouldn’t talk to me. Not about selling, not about the benefits, not about what we could do with the money for everyone who worked at Snow Creek. I had plans—real ones. Staff funds. Long-term security. Parcels of land we could gift outright. I had all the figures.
I left the prospectus on the kitchen table where he couldn’t miss it.
He missed it anyway.
The first night, there was a perfect burned ring in the middle of the cover, suspiciously saucepan-sized, as if he’d used it as a coaster out of pure spite.
The next morning, there were coffee stains, careless and deliberate at the same time.
After that, junk mail crept over it, inch by inch, until one day it was covered.
Message received.
Some of the ranch hands talked to me now, at least they answered my questions and showed me things I needed to see, and I spent a ton of time in that middle guest cabin, dragging things over until I’d made a warm and cozy nest for the books I’d ordered that sat on the shelf alongside the Broncos mug.
Gunner had even helped me to put an old easy chair in there that I’d found in the second barn.
I covered it with crocheted blankets, and it was good as new.
Well, if I didn’t look too closely. As the days turned into weeks, and I realized I was halfway through my six months, with spring right here, something shifted.
Not all at once. Quietly. In ways that were harder to argue with.
I stopped wandering aimlessly around the ranch.
I started listening to what people liked and needed, and even though it started as a way to give myself more options for setting these people up with good futures, I’d become friendly with them.
Well, as much as you can be friendly with laid-back, closed-off, stubborn cowboys.
At least Ruth made me edible eggs, and I ate mostly what everyone else did at night, and it was so damn good I’d started getting a healthy relationship with fresh home-cooked food.
Miguel was sweet. Sticking out like a sore thumb for his hair and the way he used eyeliner sometimes, and the traces of glitter on his cheeks. No one cared as long as he did his job. His sexuality didn’t define him, and that was refreshing.
They were all good people.
I spent more time in the house, cleaning when my hands needed something to do, running numbers when my head wouldn’t shut up. The rhythm settled me. Dishes. Floors. Coffee mugs lined up instead of scattered. Spreadsheets open late into the night, columns adjusting, assumptions tested and retested.
The ranch stopped feeling abstract.
It started feeling lived-in.
And somehow, I’d started spending time in my grandfather’s old room. The first time I went inside, I turned around and left. The next time, I lasted five minutes, the next ten.
This time, I sat on his bed and gazed out of the window.
I’d been staring into the middle distance for a while when my phone buzzed in my hand. Dalton had sent a stupid meme featuring a cow with a caption about “corporate restructuring” and I snorted despite myself, then hit call before I could think better of it.
He picked up straight away.
“Hi, cowboy. Long time, no hear.”
Guilt tightened in my chest because he wasn’t wrong. I’d been quieter than usual, pulling back without meaning to, or maybe exactly meaning to. Everything with Jesse had shifted under my feet, and I hadn’t figured out where to stand yet.
“Hey,” I said.
There was a beat, then his tone changed. “What’s wrong? You sound off.”
“I’m fine,” I said automatically, looking out at the yard and the stretch of land beyond it that still didn’t feel entirely real.
“Mm-hm. Try again.”
I huffed out a breath, dragging a hand over my face. “I’m just… in his room.”
“‘His room’,” Dalton repeated. “Sexy cowboy Jesse’s room?” He sounded so hopeful.
“No, my grandfather’s,” I clarified. “I’ve been coming in here. Not much. Just… a bit at a time.”
“And?”
“And it’s weird,” I said. “Feels like I’m trespassing, even though it’s mine. Like I’m waiting for him to come and tell my ass to leave and never darken his doorstep again.”
Dalton didn’t interrupt, which was exactly why I kept talking.
“I keep thinking about him being here with all that hate for me just because of who I love,” I went on. “What am I supposed to do with all this now? I don’t—” I stopped, jaw tightening. “I don’t know if I’m getting it right.”
“He left you the ranch,” Dalton pointed out, and I knew he was right, but maybe he just didn’t ever think to change his will. I bet wherever he was now, he was pissed.
I shifted on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under my weight. “It doesn’t feel like it’s any part mine. It feels like I’m making everything worse. The ranch, the sale, Jesse—”
“Ah,” Dalton cut in. “There it is.”
I closed my eyes briefly. “Don’t.”
“You said his name like it personally offended you.”
“He’s impossible,” I said, and sighed. “But I keep getting it wrong with him.”
“Wrong how?”
I hesitated, then shook my head even though he couldn’t see it. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Lucas.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, more firmly—and then it did, all of it, tumbling out before I could stop it.
“We slept together. Jesse and I. And then, I ruined it with a stupid joke, and now I don’t know what the hell is happening because I want him really badly and that makes no sense because I’m destroying his life and I’m leaving in a few months and why do I feel like I’m messing up the most important thing in my entire fucking life! ”
There was a beat of silence.
“Wait,” Dalton said slowly. “You and sexy-cowboy did the horizontal tango?”
I dragged a hand over my face. “Please never say that again.”
“Oh my God,” he went on, ignoring me. “You slept with him? When were you going to tell me?”
“I wasn’t,” I muttered. “Because it wasn’t—It just happened.”
“Was it good? Was he good? Are you doing it again? Will—”
“I said something dumb, and now he’s shut down, and I don’t know where I stand.”
“Okay,” Dalton said, tone shifting, amusement easing into something steadier. “What did you say?”
“Something about the sex being so good it might persuade me not to sell.”
“Holy shit, Lucas. You idiot.”
“I know. I just… I don’t know how to be here. Not properly.”
There was a pause on the line, then Dalton said, quieter, “You don’t have to have it figured out already.”
“I kind of do.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t. Apologize to Jesse.”
“I tried.”
“Okay, then do the next thing. That’s it.”
“The next thing,” I echoed.
“Yeah. Whatever’s in front of you.”
I let out a slow breath, gaze drifting around the room again—the furniture, the dust, the weight of a life that had been lived here before me.
“Okay,” I said finally.
“That’s my boy,” Dalton said, lighter now.
I huffed out something that might’ve been a laugh, and some of the tightness in my chest eased. “I should go.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Go do your next thing.”
“Right.”
“And, Lucas?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not screwing this up. If you said something stupid, I mean it, say sorry again, and keep saying sorry, and then, go do some more sexing of the hot, horny cowboy kind.”
“Asshole.”
“Bye!”
Okay. Do my next thing.
This room.
I stripped the bed first. Folded the sheets and stacked them neatly, then found a box and packed up his personal things.
A rancher’s almanac with a cracked spine and his notes in the margins.
A watch that no longer worked. A ring, old and worn, the inscription inside almost rubbed smooth with time.
I turned it over in my fingers longer than necessary before setting it back in the box.
Then, I emptied the drawers. Shirts. Jeans. I cleared the closet too, methodically, bagging it all up and carrying it to the front door. I left a note for Jesse, asking if any of it would be suitable for Goodwill.
The bags were gone by morning. I assumed he was dealing with them.
The ache that settled in my chest as I did all this caught me off guard. Walter Barrett hadn’t wanted me. He’d done nothing for me. He hadn’t come to Denver and fixed anything. He wasn’t my grandfather in anything but blood, and I told myself that made it easier to clear the room.
I pulled down the drapes and aired them out. Cleaned the windows until the glass shone. When the room was empty, I didn’t know what to do next.
I sat on the metal bedstead and tipped my head back. That was when I saw it—cardboard tucked right at the back of the closet, high up on the shelf. Given I was short, there was no way I could reach it from the floor, so I took a stool upstairs, dragged it over, and climbed up to get a better look.
I opened the box and froze.