9 #2
Gordon stared at her.
Not softly.
Not with easy sympathy.
Like he was weighing every word for truth.
She met his gaze because she had nothing left to hide in that answer.
“I wanted the job,” she said. “So I made a choice I knew wasn’t clean.”
The stable was quiet again.
Gordon finally nodded once.
Not forgiveness.
Acknowledgment.
Then he returned to work.
“My father came and went most of the time after I was in bed,” he said.
Talia’s pen moved quickly.
“I knew him as the man who came to see my mother. I didn’t know him as my father.”
She looked up.
“I had never seen Beau or Logan before I moved into Paul’s family home.”
The answer sat heavy between them.
“Never?” she asked.
“Never.”
“So one day your mother was gone, and the next you were in a house with your father’s wife and sons?”
“More or less.”
“How old were you?”
“That’s another question.”
Talia exhaled, then gave him a pointed look. “Fine. Your turn.”
He tossed straw into the wheelbarrow. “Why journalism?”
That one was easier.
Maybe.
“I like truth.”
He looked at her.
She gave a humorless smile. “I know how that sounds after how I got here.”
“Yes.”
“I like finding what people try to hide. I like patterns. Contradictions. Public stories that don’t match private facts.” She paused. “And I like giving shape to complicated things so people can understand them.”
“Even when the people inside those complicated things don’t want you to?”
“Especially then sometimes.”
His eyes stayed on hers.
She added, quieter, “But not always. I’m learning that difference.”
He accepted that with a small nod.
“I was eight,” he said.
Talia swallowed.
Eight years old.
Moved into the Windgate house.
New name.
New family.
Old grief.
“And Beau and Logan?”
“Older. Old enough to understand what I represented. Young enough to enjoy punishing me for it.”
Talia wrote that down, then stopped. “Did your father protect you?”
Gordon gave a short laugh without humor. “My turn.”
She sighed. “Ask.”
“Do you have siblings?”
The simplicity of the question caught her off guard.
“One sister.”
“Older or younger?”
“You only get one question.”
A faint smile touched his mouth.
There it was. Barely there, but real.
“All right.”
“Younger,” Talia said.
“That’s generous of you.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
He went back to the straw. “No. Paul did not protect me. Not in any way that meant much. Sometimes he stopped Beau and Logan if they went too far in front of him, but it was about control, not concern.”
Talia wrote.
“Did your mother ever talk about Paul with you?” she asked.
Gordon’s hands slowed.
For the first time since the interview began, he did not seem guarded so much as caught by the question.
He looked down at the rake.
“When I asked about the man who came and went, she never said Paul was my father.”
Talia’s pen stopped.
Gordon stood very still.
“She would tell me he wasn’t the best man,” he said slowly, like he was hearing the words from a long way off. “But he cared for her, and that was enough.”
His brow furrowed.
“It wasn’t until after she died that I learned the man sneaking in and out of our house was my father.”
The stable seemed to disappear around him.
Talia did not move.
Gordon’s hand tightened around the rake handle.
“I think…” He stopped.
She waited.
He looked up, but not at her. Past her. Through her. Into some room years behind him.
“I think if my mother had lived, I never would have known Windgate was my father.”
The words came out without polish.
Without preparation.
Truth slipping through before he could decide whether to give it.
Talia felt the importance of that like a pressure behind her ribs.
She did not write immediately.
Some moments did not deserve the scratch of a pen too soon.
Gordon blinked, then looked at her as if remembering she was there.
His face closed a little, but not completely.
“That your next line?” he asked. “Hidden son never meant to know?”
Talia shook her head. “No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you didn’t say it like a headline.”
His eyes held hers.
She looked back steadily.
“I won’t use it like one.”
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Gordon gave the smallest nod and turned back to finish the stall.
“Your turn,” he said.
Talia almost smiled. “You’re keeping count?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
“Do you lie often for stories?”
Her mouth tightened.
“No.”
He glanced at her.
She lifted her chin. “I have pushed. I have withheld my full angle until I understood what I had. I have let people assume things I should have corrected sooner. But I do not usually lie outright.”
“Usually.”
“I lied here.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not proud of it.”
“Are you sorry because it was wrong or because you got caught?”
Talia’s fingers tightened around her pen.
“That’s two questions.”
“They’re related.”
“They’re still two.”
“Answer one.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“Both,” she said finally. “At first, because I got caught. That’s honest. But the longer I’m here, the more it feels wrong in ways I didn’t let myself think about before.”
Gordon resumed his work, but she saw the answer land.
He finished the stall in silence, then moved to the next, and she followed. The rhythm settled between them. Scrape, lift, dump. Question, answer. Question, answer.
She asked about his mother’s name.
“Lana Cross,” he said.
His question back was whether Talia’s mother supported her career.
“I don’t know. We never talked about it except when I told her what I wanted to major in when I went to college,” Talia answered. “She told me that I should rethink my major. She didn’t think I could make it as a journalist.”
She asked what Lana had done for work.
“Sewing. Cleaning. Whatever kept us fed. She had pride, but not the kind that rejected work.”
He asked if Talia was close to her younger sister.
“Not as close as I should be.”
She asked if Lana had loved Paul.
“Yes,” Gordon said. “More than he deserved. Maybe more than was safe.”
He asked if Talia had ever been in love.
She paused too long.
Then answered, “No.”
Gordon looked at her, not quite believing.
She looked back. “Not the way people mean when they ask that.”
He accepted it.
She asked if he missed his mother.
“Every day,” he said simply.
His question came quieter. “What are you most afraid this story will cost you?”
Talia did not answer right away.
Then she said, “My chance.”
Gordon studied her.
“At the promotion?”
“At proving I was right to bet on myself.”
That answer stayed between them longer than she expected.
By the time Gordon finished the last stall, Talia’s hand ached from writing, and her mind felt packed too full. Dust clung to her boots. A piece of straw had somehow attached itself to her sleeve. Her city polish had not survived two hours in the stable.
Gordon returned the rake to its place, emptied what needed emptying, washed his hands at a utility sink, then took his hat from the post.
He set it on his head and looked at her.
“You done for now?”
“With questions?”
“With standing there pretending stable dust isn’t bothering you.”
She glanced down at herself. “It isn’t.”
“You’ve brushed your sleeve six times.”
“Observant.”
“Ranch work teaches a man to notice what’s out of place.”
“And I’m out of place?”
His gaze moved over her, not unkindly.
“Less than you were this morning.”
That should not have warmed her.
It did.
He headed toward the open stable doors. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Repair job near the storage shed.”
“What kind of repair?”
“Fence panel. Maybe a hinge.”
“Should I be taking notes?”
“Do what you want.”
She fell into step beside him, notebook tucked against her chest.
They left the stable and stepped into sunlight.
The air outside felt wide after the dust and warmth of the stalls. In the distance, the ranch moved around them, trucks, voices, horses, construction noise, life layered over work.
Talia looked at Gordon as they walked.
He had given her more than she expected.
His mother’s name.
His first name.
The truth about Paul.
A boy who had not known his father was his father.
A man still discovering what that meant.
She had come to Stanley Ranch to uncover a story.
But the first real thing she found was not a scandal.
It was a child named Gordon Cross, who had once belonged to a mother with imperfect love and decent morals, before the Windgate name swallowed him whole.
Gordon glanced at her. “You’re staring again.”
Talia looked ahead quickly. “I’m thinking.”
“About?”
She hesitated.
Then answered honestly, because that was the bargain now.
“You.”
He did not respond.
But as they walked toward the next job, she saw his hand tighten once at his side, like the answer had touched him whether he wanted it to or not.