“What?” She leans away from me enough to shake her head. “You didn’t ask?”
“Rowe didn’t tell me, and I wasn’t up for sparking a conversation with him about something so small.”
She tenses enough that I can feel it. “So, you’ve spoken with him, then?”
“Unfortunately.”
“How is he?”
“Don’t ask that. You’re not allowed to care about him enough to ask me things like that, Mom,” I bite out, knowing how ridiculously immature I sound. “Ask Ash if you really want to know.”
“Tilly.”
It’s more of an exhausted noise than a frustrated one. Either way, it annoys me. Anything involving Rowe does recently. Especially coming from my mother, considering the closerelationship she had with him when we were all growing up. Because his parents were far from nurturing, she took that role as her own.
He wasn’t her child, but she saw him like he was. For a while, he was the triplet we never had.
“Being here is bad enough. I don’t need everyone using it as an opportunity to try and get us to talk or something. It’s not going to happen.”
“I wasn’t thinking that you needed to be friends with him again.”
“What are you thinking, then?”
“I worry about him like I worry about you. You can be angry all you want because he hurt you, but you can’t pretend that he hasn’t gone through hell and back since then. Nobody else here has the nerve to ask him how he’s really doing.”
“It’s not my job to take care of him. He’s a grown man,” I mutter, shame colouring my chest a deep pink.
She pushes a hand back to rub my side soothingly. I grit my teeth at the comfort it gives me. It’s been so long since I’ve had anyone try to touch me like this. Like they actually give a shit about how I feel.
My mother is the only person besides me and Rowe who knows the truth. The full expanse of it. She knows about my ridiculous crush and the letters we sent each other during the first few months of his sentence. It was her shoulder that I cried on when his final one came through and my naïve little twenty-one-year-old heart broke.
“You’re both grown now,” she murmurs.
“You’ve been conspiring with Ash, haven’t you?”
“Me? Conspiring? You insult me.”
I laugh roughly, adjusting the reins in my hand. The shape of the round pen appears in front of us, and I guide the mare to the left so we don’t run into it. She listens well, only needingsoft commands. I know without needing to ask anyone here who trained her.
“It’s not normal for horses to look like that, is it?” Mom asks.
She lifts her hand from my shoulder and points at the black one pacing in the pen. It’s the same one I spotted when I got here earlier. Still as spitting mad, it swings its tail against the fence, snorting loudly at everyone who passes.
“Normal? No. But it’s not rare,” I answer, slowing the horse beneath me when we get close enough that I can meet the dark eyes of the angry one. “It’s like that for a reason.”
“I don’t want to ask anything else. I’ll get sad if I do.”
“We’re almost at the house.”
I dig my heels into the mare’s underside and wait for her to pick up her pace again. We leave the pen, hitting the paved road splitting this area in half. The stables are on the left, the first one open and quiet. There are a few younger kids walking up and down the aisle with wheelbarrows, doing a task that I know from experience sucks ass.
“I don’t have to leave yet, you know? I’d love to meet some of the people you’re going to be working with,” Mom says when we approach the ranch house.
“You’re stalling.”
“Are you that desperate to get rid of your poor old mother already?”
I settle the reins on my lap and twist to stare at her. She’s already trying to wiggle off the horse, glancing around in a search for her first victim. It’s only a matter of seconds before she falls onto her face.
