She picked up the reins and gave a snap to Copper, who started to walk toward the stable doors.
Wade hustled ahead and opened them, clearing the way to the snow-covered ring. The air was cold but not brutal, her breath fogging in front of her. Copper’s hooves thudded softly on the packed ground.
She circled once at a walk, holding the reins, getting used to the feel of this new rig. The saddle held her firmly, but not rigidly. She felt secure and yet strangely…unbound.
Best of all, Wade was forty feet away. She was ridingalone!
“This is amazing,” she said, the words escaping on a laugh. “I can’t even feel how the saddle is attached, just that I’m not going anywhere.”
“That’s the idea,” Wade said, leaning against the very same railing where she’d first spotted him a few weeks ago.
The paddock fell quiet except for Copper’s breathing and the occasional swoosh of his tail. Snowflakes drifted lazily out of a sky the color of soft pewter.
Wade stayed where he was, so she walked the horse to the railing, stopping to look down at him from the saddle.
“Well,” she said, shifting the reins through her fingers. “You went big.”
He pushed up to perch on the top rail, just about eye to eye with her. “Can I tell you a story about my dog named Murphy?”
She blinked. “Your…dog?”
“Yeah.” He slipped a boot onto the lower rung of the rail. His hat shadowed his eyes, but she could see the nerves in the way he wrapped his bare hands around the wood of the top rail. “Can I tell it without you making fun of my ’bama accent? Because I may lean into it.”
“I never make fun of your accent,” she said, then ruined it by adding, “Not to your face.”
He huffed a laugh. “Fair. Okay.” He drew in a breath that looked like it hurt a little. “When I was fifteen, I had a dog I loved so much, an Irish setter named Murphy. He got bone cancer.”
She felt her lip go out in pity. “Sadness.”
“He started limping one day and they found it. And you know, the vet told my dad all the practical things. The cost of surgery, the rough recovery, the crappy odds. It made sense, on paper, to let him go.”
She let out a sympathetic whimper, rubbing her hands together but forgetting the cold.
“I remember I just sat on the kitchen floor with that dog’s head in my lap and realized that Murph didn’t know anything about money or odds or spreadsheets. He just knew how to be my best pal. But we were going to put him down to spareusthe hard part. And I—I couldn’t live with that.”
“You weren’t an oncologist yet,” she said softly, rapt. “What did you do?”
“I put my little dial-up modem to work and went to war with every article, every printout, every late-night forum post about three-legged dogs. I told my parents if they said yes to the surgery, I’d handle the rest. The lifting, the icing, the meds, the ramp off the porch, since he couldn’t do stairs. I begged them for a chance to fight for Murphy’s good days instead of just…folding in front of the bad ones.”
He waited a beat and smiled, holding her gaze, looking so sweet and smart and dear that if she could have climbed off this horse and kissed him, she would have. Instead, she just listened.
“They said yes. The surgery was ugly. Recovery was harder. But then one morning, he got up on three legs and looked at me like, ‘Well? You coming or what?’”
She laughed, picturing the sweet Irish setter and a teenaged Wade Reynolds.
“I built him ramps. I rigged this ridiculous homemade sling. He learned how to run again, just…differently. We got two years, three months, and two extra days of fun. They weren’t perfect. But they were good. They were his.”
She sighed, not entirely sure of the point, unless it was to make her fall harder for him. ’Cause that happened.
“That was the first time I really understood what I am,” he said. “I’m not someone who fixes things because they’re broken. I fix what’sbetweensomeone and the life they want, for as long as they get to have it. I can’t always change the ending—that’s the curse of oncology. But I can change the middle.”
“And that’s what you wanted to do for me with all the…neuroscience and exoskeletons.”
He shook his head. “Forget all that, Elise. I just want you to not be blocked from living your best life. Not normal, not better, not up to anyone’s standards but yours. I swear.”
“And the ramp and this saddle?” She lifted the reins.
“One of the very first things you told me was that you didn’t love the process of multiple people helping and needing an escort. I started thinking about it then, called a buddy?—”
