17. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
Late fall in Texas has no business being this warm.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I stand at the kitchen window with coffee going cold in my hands, watching Malcolm Koch split firewood in my yard like he’s personally auditioning for a calendar I didn’t ask to receive.
The flannel shirt he started with is gone. Of course it is. It’s draped over the fence post like a surrender flag, and he’s down to jeans and boots and skin, acres of skin, golden-brown from weeks of farm work, muscles I forgot existed shifting under tattoos I used to trace with my tongue.
The axe comes down. Wood splits clean. The chain around his neck catches the light, and there it is, my ring, the one I left on his studio desk three months ago, bouncing against his sternum with every swing.
I take a sip of cold coffee and hate myself a little.
“You’re gonna burn a hole through that glass.”
I don’t jump, because I refuse to. “Denny. Don’t you have fence posts to check?”
He props a shoulder on the doorframe, grinning like he’s won a bet. “Checked ‘em an hour ago. Been back twice now. You ain’t moved.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Uh-huh.” He tips his hat back. “Thinking real hard about lumber, looks like.”
“Get out of my kitchen.”
He leaves laughing, and I pull the curtain shut so hard the rod squeaks.
The reading glasses are new.
He’s started wearing them when he squints at feed labels, at the small print on medication bottles, at the notes I leave about which hen’s been off her laying schedule. Wire-framed, slightly bent, perched on his nose while he frowns at a bag of senior horse grain like it personally offended him.
“Since when do you need glasses?” I ask, not meaning to ask anything.
He looks up, and the frames make his eyes look bigger somehow. Bluer. More earnest, which should be impossible. “Since thirty-three, apparently. Ophthalmologist in the city said I’d been squinting for years.” He pulls them off, rubs the bridge of his nose. “You never noticed?”
I noticed everything, including when you stopped noticing me.
“No,” I say, and walk away to check on Duchess, who doesn’t need checking.
The paint shows up in strange places.
Cadmium yellow on his jaw at breakfast. Prussian blue under his thumbnail when he hands me the salt. A smear of deep red, alizarin crimson, my brain supplies, traitor, across his throat one morning, like someone dragged a finger there.
He’s painting again. In the barn loft, after dark, when he thinks I’m asleep. I hear him sometimes, boots on the ladder rungs, the creak of the old floorboards up there.
I don’t ask.
Asking would mean caring, and caring would mean this is more than what it is: a man working off a debt he can never pay, in a place I haven’t decided to let him stay.
I sleep in his flannel.
Not the one he left on the fence post, an older one, soft from years of washing, blue and gray plaid that I stole from his side of our closet in New York before I packed the car. I told myself it was practical. Good for layering. Texas nights get cold.
I’m a spectacular liar, especially to myself.
It smells like him. Or it did, and then it smelled like me, and now I can’t tell the difference, and maybe that’s worse. I wear it to bed every night and wash it every three days and tell myself it’s about laundry efficiency.
Bree would cackle if she knew. June too.
I tug the collar up around my nose in the dark and breathe deep and absolutely don’t think about the man sleeping sixty yards away in my bunkhouse, probably staring at my window the same way I’m not staring at his.
The low point comes at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday.
I’m lying in bed, too hot under the quilt, the twins turning slow somersaults behind my navel that might be kicks or might be gas or might be two tiny humans conspiring against my bladder. I’ve already gotten up twice. I won’t get up again. I refuse.
My phone glows on the nightstand.
I unblocked his number three days ago. I don’t remember deciding to, just found myself staring at the blocked contacts list at 4 a.m., thumb hovering, and then it was done.
He hasn’t texted or called or pressed.
Because I told him not to, and he’s actually listening, the infuriating bastard.
I pick up the phone. Put it down. Pick it up again.
There’s June I could text, or Bree, or anyone.
I call Mal’s number instead.
It rings once, just once, and I hang up so fast I nearly throw the phone across the room, then shove my face into the pillow and make a sound that might be a scream or might be a laugh or might be the desperate wheeze of a pregnant woman who’s clearly lost her entire mind.
I’m thirty-one years old. I have a doctorate. I deliver baby goats and diagnose equine colic and once pulled a breech calf at three in the morning with a headlamp between my teeth.
And I’m prank-calling my own husband like a seventh grader with a crush.
I don’t sleep for another two hours.
The sketch comes the next morning, same as always, slipped under my front door sometime before dawn, pencil on good paper, his handwriting on the back.
But this one’s different.
It’s my phone. My actual phone, the cracked case and the little sticker June put on it, drawn mid-ring with motion lines radiating out like sound.
I flip it over.
you hung up. i’d have listened all night. to anything, weather reports, hen grievances, silence.
I press my hand flat against my chest like I can hold my heart inside my ribs.
He knew it was me, and he didn’t answer, didn’t push, didn’t take the inch I accidentally offered, just woke up this morning and told me, in pencil, that he’d have taken whatever scraps I gave.
Denny finds me ten minutes later standing in the same spot, still holding the paper.
“You okay, boss?”
“Fine,” I say, voice steady. “Just reading.”
He looks at the sketch. Looks at me. Has the grace not to comment.
The wall cracks on a Thursday night.
I hear him before I see him, boots on gravel, the heavy thunk of split wood being stacked. He’s building up my porch pile, has been doing it all week, quiet and methodical and asking for nothing.
I’m standing at the window with the lights off, watching.
It’s become a ritual I won’t examine. Him working in the dark. Me watching from the dark. Neither of us acknowledging the other exists, even though we both know.
He sets the last piece on the stack, straightens up, wipes his forehead with his arm.
And then he looks up.
Not at the door, at the window. My window. Eyes finding the exact spot where I’m standing, like he can see through glass and shadow and every wall I’ve built.
He can’t, I know he can’t, because the lights are off.
But he looks anyway.
And then, the part that guts me, the part that will keep me awake for hours, he turns around. Tips his head once, like a nod, like a goodnight, like I know you’re there and I’m not going to push, and starts walking back toward the bunkhouse.
Keeping the distance.
Honoring the line I drew.
Leaving me alone with my cold house and my cooling tea and the two heartbeats I haven’t told him about, even though he’s earned the chance to hear them.
The door creaks.
I don’t remember deciding to open it.
But I’m standing on the porch now, cold night air on my face, and he’s frozen mid-stride halfway to the bunkhouse, not turning around yet, like he’s afraid he imagined the sound.
“There’s stew left.”
My voice comes out rougher than I want. Smaller too.
He turns slowly. The chain glints at his throat. His face in the moonlight is careful, guarded, hopeful enough to make me want to run back inside and lock every door.
“Stew?” he says.
“Denny made too much. I’m tired of leftovers.”
It’s not an invitation or forgiveness.
It’s stew.
He nods once, and follows me inside, and doesn’t say a word when I point at the kitchen table and turn my back to pretend the dishes need washing.
The stew takes him twenty minutes to eat. I wash the same pot three times.
Neither of us speaks.
But when he finally stands up, carries his bowl to the sink, and his arm brushes mine as he sets it down. I don’t step away.
He leaves after that. Walks back out into the cold.
But tomorrow morning, when the sketch comes, a bowl of stew, steam curling off it, and on the back: thank you. I don’t throw it away.
I put it in the drawer with all the others.
The storm comes in three days later, and it comes in mean.
I know it before the sky does. Biscuit knows it first. My old chestnut mare has predicted weather better than any app for going on two decades, and when I bring the evening feed out she won’t touch it, just stands at the back of her stall with her ears pinned and her weight shifted wrong, and I go cold and professional all at once, the way I do on a bad call.
I’ve been a vet for eight years. I have delivered breech calves at three in the morning and stitched a barbed-wire mare back together by the light of a truck’s high beams and diagnosed things city clinics sent home with a shrug.
I know the exact quality of quiet a sick horse makes. Biscuit is making it.
“Hey, old girl.” I let myself in, run my hands down her neck, her flank, watch her try to nip at her own side. “Yeah. I see you.”
Colic. The word every horse person prays not to think and thinks anyway. Her gums are tacky when I check them, her gut too quiet on the left and too loud on the right, and outside the first fat drops are starting to hit the barn roof like thrown gravel.
I don’t panic. Panicking is a luxury for people who don’t have their hands inside the problem. I get my kit from the tack room, my kit, in my barn, on my land, the sentence I built for myself one quiet month at a time, and I get to work, and the sky opens up like it’s been waiting for an audience.
Mal finds me twenty minutes in.
I don’t hear him over the rain. One second I’m crouched at Biscuit’s head with a stethoscope and a headlamp, and the next there’s a shape filling the barn door, soaked to the skin, chest heaving like he ran the whole way from the bunkhouse.