Levi had missed this. He couldn’t pretend otherwise. Couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t eaten at him, five years away from the ranch.
The animals were in his blood, in his bones. Had been ever since he had taken that job at Bud’s ranch. That experience had changed him. Given him hope for the future. Allowed him to see things in a different way. Allowed him to see something other than a life filled with pain, fear.
The other kids at school had always avoided him. He was the boy who came to school with bruises on his face. The boy whose family was whispered about. Whose mother always looked sallow and unhappy, and whose father was only ever seen at night, being pulled drunkenly out of bars.
But the horses had never seen him that way. He had earned their trust. And he had never taken it for granted.
The back of a horse was the one place he had ever felt like he truly belonged. And things hadn’t changed much. Twenty-three years—five of them spent behind bars—later, and things hadn’t changed much.
He looked back from his position on the horse, and the grin on Faith’s face lit up all the dark places inside him. He hadn’t expected to enjoy sharing this with her. But then, he hadn’t expected to share so much with her at all.
There was something about her. It was that sense of innocence.
That sense of newness.
A sense that if he could be close enough to her he might be able to see the world the way she did. As a place full of possibility, rather than a place full of pain. Betrayal. Heartbreak.
Yes, with her, he could see the scope of so much more. And it made him want to reach out to her. It made him want to...
He wanted her to understand him.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling that way before. He hadn’t wanted Alicia to understand him.
He hadn’t cared. He’d loved her. But that love had been wrapped up in the life he wanted to build. In the vision of what they could be. He’d been focused on forward motion, not existing in the moment.
And maybe, there, Faith was right. Maybe that was where he had failed as a husband.
Though, he still hadn’t failed so spectacularly that he’d deserved to be sent to prison, but he could acknowledge that some of the unhappiness in his marriage had come down to him.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Faith said.
“This is actually part of the property for the new house,” he said. He glanced up at the sky, where the dark gray clouds were beginning to gather, hanging low. “It’s starting to look stormy, but if you don’t mind taking a chance on getting caught in the rain, I can show you where we might put the equestrian facility.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
He urged his horse on, marveling at how quickly he had readjusted to this thing, to horsemanship, to feeling a deep brightness in his bones. If that wasn’t evidence this was where he belonged, in the woods on the back of a horse, he didn’t know what was.
They came through a deep, dark copse of trees and out into a clearing. The clouds there were layers of patchwork gray, moving from silver to a kind of menacing charcoal, like a closed fist ready to rain down judgment on the world below.
And there was the clearing. Overlooking the valley below.
The exact positioning he wanted, so he could look down on everyone who had once looked down on him.
“You think you can work with this?” he asked.
“Definitely,” she responded. She maneuvered her horse around so she was more fully facing the view before them. “I want to make it mirror your house somehow. Functional, obviously. But open. I know the horses weren’t in prison for the last five years, but they had their lives stolen from them, too, in a way. I want it all connected. And I want you to feel free.”
Interesting that she had used that word. A word that had meant so much to him. One he had yearned for so much he’d traded cigarettes to have a symbol of it tattooed on his body.
It was a symbol he was deeply protective of. He wasn’t a sentimental man, and his tattoos were about the closest thing to sentiment he possessed.
“I like the way you think,” he said.
He meant it. In many ways. And not just this instance.
She tilted her head, scrunching her nose and regarding him like he was something strange and fascinating. “Why do you like the way I think?”
“Because you see more than walls, Faith. You see what they can mean to people. Not just the structure. But what makes people feel. Four walls can be a prison sentence or they can be a refuge. That difference is something I never fully appreciated until I was sent away.”
