Chapter 20
Clay
I drove home and didn't remember a single mile of it.
The truck found the ranch on its own — muscle memory, tires on gravel, the automatic left at the county road and the right at the Blackwood gate.
My hands were on the steering wheel at ten and two, and they hadn't moved since Callie's driveway.
My jaw was clenched so tight my back teeth ached.
The radio was off. The heater was off. The windows were up and the cab was cold and I didn't notice any of it until I parked at the house and reached for the keys and my hand was shaking.
I stared at it. My hand. Shaking on the ignition key. I'd ridden two-thousand-pound bulls at full spin. I'd taken a horn to the ribs in Tulsa and walked out of the arena under my own power. Copperhead had cracked two ribs on the dismount, and I'd stood in the dirt and tipped my hat to the crowd.
Callie Monroe said you've known her for a few months, and my hand wouldn't stop.
Just because it had been only for a few months, didn’t mean I didn’t love her with every piece of my heart. Both of them.
I sat in the truck until the cold seeped through my jacket and my breath fogged the windshield.
I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and closed my eyes and stayed there until the ache in my chest dulled to something I could breathe around.
Then I went inside and lay on my bed fully clothed and stared at the ceiling until it got light.
I was in the barn before dawn.
Mucking stalls before the sun cleared the ridge.
Not because the stalls needed it — Jack had done them yesterday — but because the pitchfork was heavy and the work was repetitive and every forkful was something I could control.
My shoulders burned. My eyes burned worse.
I kept going. Drove the pitchfork in harder.
Threw the hay further than it needed to go.
Worked until my shirt was soaked through and my arms shook, and the only thing I could feel was the strain in my muscles instead of the hole in my chest.
I mucked the first stall. The second. The third. I cleaned stalls that were already clean. I reorganized the tack room. I swept the aisle twice. The barn cats watched me from the rafters with the patient, unblinking judgment of creatures who understood obsessive behavior and wanted no part of it.
Hunter came in with coffee.
He didn't say anything. Just set a mug on the stall partition and leaned against the opposite wall with his own and drank. That was Hunter. He didn't announce himself, didn't ask questions, didn't fill silence with noise. He just showed up where he was needed and stayed until it was done.
I stopped. Leaned on the pitchfork. Picked up the mug. Black, strong — coffee as a structural material, not a beverage. The barn was quiet except for the horses shifting and the cats rearranging themselves in the hay.
Five minutes. Maybe ten. Long enough for the coffee to hit and the silence to become the kind you could lean on.
"She ended it," I said.
Hunter's mug stopped halfway to his mouth. He lowered it.
"The filing," he said. Not a question.
"'Unvetted third parties.' That's what they called me. She thinks if she cuts me out, he has no case."
"Does he?"
"Savannah says no. The filing's weak. Community support is overwhelming." I set the mug down. "She knows all of this. And she still ended it because her brain heard unvetted third parties and translated it into Clay is the reason they're going to take Maisie. "
Hunter finished his coffee. Set the mug beside mine on the partition.
"She'll come back," he said.
"How do you know?"
He looked at me. Straight on. Hunter didn't give you his full attention often. When he did, you felt the weight of it.
"Because she's smart," he said. "Smart people figure it out. It just takes them longer because they think their way into the problem and they have to think their way back out."
"And if she doesn't?"
"She will." He picked up his thermos. Screwed the cap on. "But you can't be the one to convince her. She has to get there on her own."
He left the way he came. Quiet. No goodbye. Just the barn door sliding shut and the sound of his boots on gravel fading toward the equipment shed. He'd given me exactly what I needed and not a word more.
Momma found me on the porch that evening.
Same chair. Same view — the paddocks darkening, the hills going purple, the sky caught somewhere between gold and blue and trying both at once.
I had a beer in my hand. I hadn't drunk any of it. Momma sat beside me and rocked. I sat. The porch boards creaked and the evening bugs started up. Somewhere in the south paddock, a yearling whickered and another one answered, and the ranch went about its business of being alive.
"She ended it, Momma."
My voice cracked on the last word, and I clenched my jaw and looked out at the paddock because if I looked at my mother right now, I was going to fall apart. She kept rocking. Didn't rush to fill the silence. Just let it sit there between us, gave it room.
"She thinks if she cuts me out, Preston won't have a case."
Rock. Rock. Rock.
"She knows it's wrong. I could see it —" I rubbed my hand across my face.
Pressed my fingers into my eyes. "She was saying the words, and her face was saying something completely different.
She'd rehearsed the whole thing. Practiced it.
And the whole time her voice was cracking and her hands were shaking and she couldn't look at me.
" I put the beer on the rail. My throat was tight.
"She's doing what he wants, Momma. She's making herself small again. Climbing back into the box he built.”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “I feel like I’m fucking dying,” I confessed and quickly wiped at the tear that slipped out without my permission.
Momma stopped rocking. I heard her take a slow breath.
"Of course she did," she said. Quiet. Not surprised. Like she'd been waiting for this call all day.
I turned to her. She was looking at the hills, but her eyes were soft and sad, and there was something in her face that I recognized — the look she got when one of us was hurting and she couldn't fix it with food or a phone call or sheer force of will.
"She's not pushing you away because she doesn't love you, Clay. She's pushing you away because she does. And she's terrified that loving you costs Maisie."
"It doesn't."
"We know that." She turned to me then. Put her hand on my knee and held it there.
"But she's not thinking with the part of her brain that knows things right now.
She's thinking with the part that survived Preston.
And that part doesn't trust anything good, because every good thing that man gave her came with a price. "
She was quiet for a moment. Her thumb moved across my knee the way it had when I was small and couldn't sleep.
"When you have a child — and I can only speak from my own experience as a mother — it's like watching your heart walk around outside your body.
It's the most unimaginable love. And Callie would throw herself under a bus a million times over if it meant protecting Maisie.
That's not weakness, baby. That's the fiercest thing a person can be. "
My eyes burned. I blinked hard and looked at the sky and breathed through it.
Doesn’t she know by now I’d throw myself under that bus, too?
"She's wrong," Momma said. "But she needs to figure that out herself. You can't argue someone out of fear. You can only outlast it."
"You told me that before."
"Because it's still the answer." Her grip tightened on my knee. "So you outlast it. You're a Blackwood. We're stubborn."
I put my hand over hers. Held on. Something in my chest cracked open just enough to let air in.
"What if stubborn's not enough?"
She turned her hand over under mine and laced her fingers through and squeezed.
"It's always been enough in this family.
You just have to survive the middle part.
" She held on for another beat. Then she stood.
Smoothed her skirt. "I'm going to bake something.
When I don't know what else to do, I bake.
It's a character flaw, and I'm not working on it. "
She went inside. The screen door closed behind her. I sat on the porch and didn't drink my beer and let the dark come.
I walked into the kitchen the next morning for coffee and stopped in the doorway.
Momma was on the phone. Notepad out, pen moving in her precise handwriting. Savannah — I could tell from the cadence, the legal terms she was writing down, the way she tilted her head when she was processing information she intended to act on.
Dad was at the table across from her. Reading glasses on, a folder open, the family attorney's voice coming through the speakerphone tinny and measured. Dad was making notes in the margins. When Dad wrote things down, it meant he wanted receipts.
Maggie was at the counter with her laptop. She looked up when I appeared.
"Clara Mae Henderson has written her character reference," she said.
"I haven't read it yet, but she called me crying, which means it's either devastating or unhinged.
Possibly both." She scrolled. "June Parker's is done.
Dottie's working on hers. Sheriff Martinez said he'd have something by Friday.
The school principal is pulling Maisie's attendance and behavior records. "
I stood in the doorway.
"Nobody asked you to do this," I said.
Momma covered the phone with her hand. The look she gave me could've peeled paint.
"Nobody had to." She went back to Savannah.
I called Weston that afternoon from the south paddock fence with the yearlings grazing behind me and the wind coming across the valley cold and sharp.
"She ended it," I said.
"I know. Savannah told me. I’m sorry, man. I know that doesn’t fix anything, but it’s still true.”
"What do I do?"
"What does your gut say?"