12. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
The trailer backs in at seven in the morning, and my farm wakes up like it’s been holding its breath for three years.
Denny’s already at the gate with a clipboard, an actual clipboard, like he’s conducting a livestock census, and I’d laugh if my throat wasn’t so tight.
The ramp drops. Duchess descends first, because of course she does, her black-and-white head swinging left, then right, assessing the property like she’s reviewing a hotel she’s not sure meets her standards.
She finds the patch of clover by the old oak and settles there, chewing with the slow satisfaction of someone who’s exactly where she belongs.
“That one’s going to be trouble,” Denny mutters, making a note.
“That one’s going to be fine. It’s the other one you need to worry about.”
Meatball hits the ground running. Literally running, a brown blur of determined beef heading straight for the east fence like she’s already mapped out the weak spots from the trailer window.
“Meatball!” I yell. “Meatball, don’t you dare-”
She dares. She’s through the fence gap before Denny even looks up from his clipboard.
“I’ll get her,” he sighs, already jogging. “You handle the murder chickens.”
The hens pour out of the trailer like a feathered tide, immediately fanning across the yard with the coordinated chaos of a heist crew. One of them, the speckled one Bree called “the ringleader”, makes direct eye contact with me, then sprints toward the vegetable garden I haven’t planted yet.
“I see you,” I tell her. “I know exactly what you are.”
She doesn’t care. None of them care. They’re already scratching up the yard, establishing territory, claiming my farm like they’ve always lived here.
And then Waffles comes around the corner of the barn.
He stops. His ears go flat. He surveys the invasion with the cold fury of a landlord who didn’t approve these subletters, and I swear to God he looks at me like this is a personal betrayal.
“They’re staying,” I tell him. “Be nice.”
He’s not nice. He spends the next hour positioning himself between the new animals and every important location on the property, the water trough, the good shade, the spot by the fence where the morning light hits best. Duchess ignores him.
Meatball, once Denny drags her back, tries to befriend him.
The hens give him a wide berth, which is the only smart thing they do all morning.
But Biscuit.
Biscuit comes to me.
She’s slower than I remember, her chestnut coat duller, her steps careful over the uneven ground. But she walks straight to where I’m standing by the trailer, and she drops her heavy old head over my shoulder, and she breathes out like she’s been waiting. Like she knew I’d come back.
“Hey, old girl,” I whisper into her neck. “I missed you too.”
She smells like hay and dust and home. I close my eyes and breathe it in, and my shoulders come down from around my ears for the first time in months. My hand finds my stomach without thinking, still flat enough, still hidden, but I know what’s there. Who’s there.
“You’re going to meet them,” I tell Biscuit quietly. “Eventually. When I figure out how to - when I figure out anything.”
She doesn’t answer. She just stands there, solid and warm and patient, like she has all the time in the world.
The day passes in a blur of fencing and feeding and chasing Meatball twice more.
Denny handles most of it, he’s good, better than I remembered, and he doesn’t ask questions about why I’m moving slower, why I keep stopping to sit down, why I turned green at the smell of the chicken feed this morning.
He just hands me water and points me toward shade and pretends not to notice.
By golden hour the next evening, I’m on the porch choking down a glass of ginger ale that’s doing nothing for the nausea and tastes like a candle, watching the light turn everything amber.
Waffles has finally accepted that the new animals aren’t leaving, though he’s positioned himself on the highest point of the pasture like a general surveying conquered territory.
The hens have found the barn. Meatball is plotting her next escape; I can see it in her eyes.
And then I hear the engine.
I know that truck before it crests the hill, the slight knock in the engine Mal always meant to fix, the way the tires crunch on gravel, and my whole body goes cold.
He comes up the drive slow. Careful. Like he’s not sure he’s allowed.
The truck stops at the fence line. Not past it. Just there, idling, and I can see him through the windshield, thinner than he should be, his brown hair longer, his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
He turns off the engine.
He gets out.
And I see my ring.
It’s on a chain around his neck, hanging against his chest where his shirt’s unbuttoned, catching the golden light like it’s mocking me.
He’s holding his hat in his hands, actually holding it, like some old movie about a man who’s come to beg, and he doesn’t come past the fence.
He just stands there, looking at me, and I’ve never seen Malcolm Koch look this wrecked.
“Gracie.” It comes out of him broken.
I don’t move from the porch. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
He nods at the dirt. “I know.”
“I said five months. No contact.”
He swallows hard. “I do. And I’m not - I’m not here to argue. I’m not here to explain. I just needed to-” He stops. Starts again. “Someone called me. Said you came home.”
“So you drove a day and a half to stand at my fence?”
“I drove a day and a half to make sure you were real.” His voice breaks again. “To make sure I didn’t imagine you for three years. To see if maybe-”
“Go on.”
He doesn’t answer. He just looks at me, and his eyes are so blue it hurts, and I still know exactly what that expression means, damn him, lost and desperate and completely out of his depth.
“Mal.” I stand up, and my legs feel like they belong to someone else. “You unveiled a portrait of her. Of Odette. The masterpiece you spent six months on-”
“I know what I did.”
“-was her face. Her face, Mal. At your biggest show. The whole world watching, and I was standing there in a dress I bought for you, and it was her-”
“I do.” He takes one step forward, then stops himself.
“I know what I did. I know what it looked like. I know-” He runs a hand through his hair, and the gesture is so familiar it makes my chest ache.
“I ended it. All of it. Cut Odette off completely, canceled the tour, told Elias I’m done until-” He stops.
“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters until you say it does. ”
“And what do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.” His voice is raw. “I don’t know, Gracie. I just know I can’t - I can’t be in that house anymore. I can’t look at my paints, can’t do anything except think about you and hate myself for every single day I-” He breaks off. “You left your ring on my desk.”
“I know what I left.”
“You wrote that I was a terrible husband.”
“You were.”
He flinches like I’ve hit him. Good. Good, he should flinch. He should feel every word of that note land somewhere behind his sternum, the same way I felt standing in that gallery, the same way I felt every night he came home late smelling like turpentine and guilt.
But my hand is on my stomach again, hidden by the porch railing, and I’m carrying his children, and he doesn’t know. And the woman who wrote that note, the one about being second, about lies of omission, about never being enough, that woman is now keeping the biggest secret of her life.
Bree’s voice echoes in my head: Make him earn every inch.
“You can stay,” I hear myself say.
His head snaps up. “What?”
“Not in the house.” I come down the porch steps, and every step feels like a choice I can’t take back.
“The bunkhouse behind the barn. You work the farm like any other hand. No money, no press, no phone calls to your agent, no Odette, no assumptions.” I stop at the bottom of the stairs.
“And if I tell you to leave, you leave.”
“Gracie-”
“I want to see what you are out here.” My voice is harder than I mean it to be. “Away from that city and everything that made you forget me.”
“I never forgot you.”
“Then prove it.”
He nods, once, sharp. “Okay.”
“Five months minus the two you’ve already wasted. Clock’s mine.”
“Okay.”
He starts toward the gate, hat still in his hands, and Waffles appears from nowhere.
The donkey plants himself directly in Mal’s path. Ears flat, eyes murderous. And before Mal can say a single word, Waffles bites him, a solid, deliberate chomp right on the forearm that makes Mal yelp and stumble backward.
“Waffles,” Mal says, shocked. “What the hell-”
I don’t stop the donkey.
I turn around and walk back into the house, and I leave the rest to the donkey.