Something is different.
Not dramatic.
Not a grand gesture or a speech or a moment where he takes my face in his hands and declares himself.
Lee doesn’t operate that way, he never has.
What’s different is subtler and, because of that, more terrifying.
The rigid control that’s defined him since I walked into that feed store has softened.
Not dissolved—softened.
Like a fist that’s been clenched has slowly, carefully, begun to open.
He asks about Earl.
Not the polite, surface-level question he’s been offering since I started working here.
This is specific.
How was the chemo session? What did the oncologist say about the bloodwork? Whether Earl’s eating enough.
I tell him. He listens. Really listens—the way he listens to horses, with his whole body oriented toward the sound, his eyes on mine, his attention undivided.
When I mention that Earl’s been too tired to do the evening feed, Lee nods once and says, “I’ll go by after rounds.”
Simple. Quiet. A man deciding to show up.
He does this all week.
Tuesday, he’s in the barn when I arrive, already working.
He’s moved the bay’s grooming supplies to the station next to where I set up my tools, which means we’re working side by side now instead of at opposite ends of the aisle.
He doesn’t mention the rearrangement.
Neither do I.
We just exist in the same space, our routines overlapping, our rhythms syncing the way two people’s do when they stop resisting the pull.
His hand on my lower back when he passes behind me in the aisle.
Not lingering. Not sexual. Just a touch that says I’m here, I see you, you’re real.
His fingers brushing mine when he hands me a hoof pick.
His shoulder pressing against mine when we lean over a horse’s leg to check an abscess together.
Wednesday, he laughs at something I say.
Not a polite exhale, not the careful humor he uses to deflect.
Areal laugh—short, surprised, like it escaped before he could catch it.
I’d been telling Grace about a stallion I shoed in Amarillo who was terrified of plastic bags, and how the owner kept a windsock on the barn that sent the horse into hysterics every Tuesday when the trash truck came, and Lee laughed.
His whole face changed.
