“About twenty minutes. Scared the shit out of me.”
I glance at him and see genuine fear in his expression. Not arrogance. Not control. Just raw, unfiltered concern. Like I’m not just some game to him.
That can't be right.
“I worked as an EMT for a bit,” he continues, answering the question I haven't asked yet. “So I know what to look for. Your pupils look normal. You're coherent. But you need to take it easy. Lots of rest.”
“You were an EMT?”
“Yeah. Less than a year though. Then it was back to the ranch.”
I take another sip of tea, studying him. He must have carried me back inside. Changed me. Made tea. Put ice on my head.
Taken care of me.
“I didn't always want to be in the family business,” he says quietly, staring at the mug in my hands instead of meeting my eyes. “I really wanted to be a firefighter.”
“What stopped you?”
He laughs. “My father. The ranch. Generations of legacy that I was supposed to carry on whether I wanted to or not.”
“Did you want to?”
“No. But what I wanted never really mattered. Dad made that clear from the time I could walk. I was the oldest. The son. It was my responsibility to take over. To run the ranch while Mackenzie got to do the easy part.”
There's bitterness there now. Old resentment.
“What's the easy part?”
“Not being there.” He shakes his head. “She got to leave. Go to college. But me? I was stuck. Do you know what running a ranch is like?”
I shake my head, immediately regretting the movement when pain flares.
“It's brutal,” he continues. “Up before dawn, working until you can't see straight. Fixing fences, moving cattle, dealing with sick animals and broken equipment and weather that can destroy a whole season in one night. It's dangerous and exhausting and there's never enough money. Never. We were barely scraping by, year after year, and Dad just kept saying, ‘This is how it's always been done, son.’”
He stands, pacing now, the words tumbling out like he's been holding them in for too long.
“Mackenzie would come home for holidays and complain about how hard her classes were, and I wanted to scream. Because at least she got to choose. At least she had options. But me? I was trapped in this legacy I never asked for.”
He stops pacing, stares out the window at the storm. “I met this guy at a livestock auction. Smooth talker, expensive suit. Said he was looking to invest in family ranches, help them modernize. New equipment, better irrigation systems, commercial expansion. Everything we needed to finally turn a real profit.”
My stomach sinks. I know where this is going.
“He made it sound so easy. So smart. A partnership where we'd still own the land but he'd provide the capital to upgradeeverything. I thought…” He turns back to me, and I can see the shame in his eyes. “I thought I was saving us. Thought I was finally going to prove I could do more than just follow in my father's footsteps.”
“What happened?”
“It was a scam. Not completely, that's what made it so good. The contract was legal, technically. But buried in all that legal language were clauses that gave him control over huge sections of our grazing land. And once he had that, we realized he didn't want to help the ranch. He wanted to destroy it. We nearly lost everything because I was too arrogant and too desperate to listen to my family and do my due diligence.”
“But you didn't lose the ranch.”
“No. But it cost us, as I’m sure my sister told you. Lawyers, court battles, finally selling off the north pasture just to buy our way out of that contract. A hundred and fifty acres of prime grazing land… gone. Because of me.”
He sits back down on the bed, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.
“I feel like a piece of shit because of it. Every day. I got cocky, didn't listen to my family, thought I knew better. And I destroyed something that wasn't even mine to destroy.”
I want to reach for him and tell him it's okay. But I don't know if it is.
