A pause. Water shuts off. “I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t convincing.”
A short laugh.
Not bitter—tired. “I’m managing. The ranch is… it’s a lot. Earl can’t keep up with it. I’m doing my best but I’m one person. Fences are falling down, equipment’s breaking, and on top of all of it, there’s some guy—rancher from the area—who keeps showing up with offers to buy the place.”
My hands stop on the bridle.
“Buy Earl’s ranch?” Grace sounds surprised.
“Wade Lockhart. Old-money family, been around here forever. His people have been buying up smaller spreads for years—quiet, polite, always with a good offer and a handshake.Showed up on the porch last week with a casserole and a number. Earl told him no. Lockhart smiled and said he understood and left like it was nothing.” Another pause. “But it’s not nothing. I can feel it. The way he looked at the land when he was leaving—patient. Like a man who knows he’s going to get what he wants eventually.”
“That sounds predatory,” Grace says.
“It sounds like a man who sees a sick old rancher with no heirs and figures time is on his side.” Bex’s voice hardens. “He’s not wrong about the no heirs part. Rose was Earl’s only child. There’s nobody after him except me, and I’m not blood. I’m just the stray he took in.”
“You’re more than that,” Grace says quietly.
“Try explaining that to a county assessor.”
I stand in the tack room with a bridle in my hands and a new fire building in the part of me that never stopped being Road Captain—the part that maps threats the way I map routes, that identifies danger before it reaches the people I’m supposed to protect.
Wade Lockhart. Old money. Patient. Circling a dying man’s ranch.
Earl’s ranch. Rose’s ranch.
The land where she grew up, where she learned to ride, where I got on one knee in the barn and asked her to spend her life with me.
Bex leaves a little after two in the afternoon.
Grace and her caught up for a while and chatted quite a bit after she was done.
I hear the diesel rig pull out of the compound and the sound of it fading down the road, and something in my chest loosens by a fraction.
The air gets easier to breathe.
The barn goes back to being just a barn instead of a minefield of awareness.
She’ll be back. That’s the arrangement.
Twice a week for the foreseeable future, until the rescues are stable and the corrective work is done.
I can handle twice a week.
Shadow finds me in the barn that evening.
He doesn’t say anything at first—just leans against the stall door and watches me brush the chestnut mare with more concentration than the task requires.
“So,” he says.
“No.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to ask how the farrier assessment went.”
