The whole state turns itself inside out for six weeks—wildflowers, warm evenings, the particular quality of light that makes everything look like a painting you’d buy if you saw it in a gallery but wouldn’t believe was real.
I’m on the cabin porch, coffee in my hands.
Boots on, because I’ve been dressed since five and the first client isn’t until nine and this hour—the one between ready and going—belongs to me.
The cabin is ours now.
Really ours—not the cautious, still-figuring-it-out version of ours from the first month, but the lived-in, broken-in, this-is-how-we-work version.
Lee’s boots are next to mine by the door.
His jacket on the hook beside my barn coat.
The bathroom floor is finally done—he laid the tile himself, swearing creatively for three weekends straight while I sat on the closed toilet lid and offered commentary he did not request.
The kitchen wall has my farrier calendar and his rescue intake board and a framed photo of us from the club Christmas party that Grace took when neither of us was looking—Lee’s arm around my shoulder, my head tipped toward him, both of us laughing at something Shadow said.
It’s a good life inside this cabin.
A small life, built from scratch on a foundation of grief and stubbornness and the specific kind of love that only grows between two people who lost the same person and decided, against all reason, to find each other in the wreckage.
But we’re outgrowing it.
Lee brought it up last week.
Sitting on this porch, the same way we talk about everything—coffee, quiet, the land stretched out in front of us.
Earl’s ranch. The house. The electrical needs updating.
The plumbing in the kitchen hasn’t been touched since the eighties.
The roof is solid but the windows need replacing and the master bathroom is a time capsule from the Ford administration.
It needs work. Real work. Months of it.
But it’s Earl’s house. Rose’s house.
I want to update the plumbing and replace the windows and make it ours without erasing what it was.
I want the kitchen to smell like my coffee and Lee’s cooking and still hold the ghost of Rose’s tamales on Christmas Eve.
Lee’s already talked to Phantom about renting this cabin to one of the brothers.
Blaze, probably—he’s been sleeping in the clubhouse since his divorce and the man deserves a door that locks and a shower he doesn’t have to share with a bunch of other guys.
The cabin is good.
It served us well.
But Earl’s ranch is where we’re supposed to be, and we both know it.
I hear Lee in the barn before I see him.
The low murmur of his voice—not words, just sound, the steady rhythm of a man talking to a horse that doesn’t need to understand the language to understand the meaning.
He’s been up since four. Always is.
The horses are his church and dawn is his service and I stopped trying to beat him to the barn months ago.
