My phone stayed off. Had been since the plane. I used the laptop instead, because a laptop didn’t ring, didn’t buzz with voicemails I couldn’t bring myself to listen to, didn’t light up with a name I wasn’t ready to see.
I checked ranch listings in Colorado. Scrolled through properties I could never afford, studying acreage and barn dimensions and water rights like I was shopping instead of torturing myself. Three bedrooms, mountain views, room for four horses. I’d get as far as the price and close the tab. Open another one. Close that too.
This was my life now. Mourning the things I’d lost.
Maggie lastedtwelve days before she broke.
I knew it was coming. She had the McCrae patience, which was to say, she had about two weeks’ worth before the Scottish directness kicked in.
She found me on the fire escape at six in the morning. I’d been running in Central Park at five, the only hour the city was quiet enough to think, and had come back sweaty and hollow-eyed and not remotely interested in conversation.
Maggie sat down beside me without asking and handed me a coffee. She was still in pajamas, her honey-blonde hair in a messy knot, looking like a woman who’d been up with twins half the night and had still gotten out of bed early to ambush her cousin.
We weren’t cousins. Not technically. She was a McCrae by blood, Patrick’s daughter, born just months before her mother Shannon died from a pulmonary embolism. I was a Gracen, Theresa’s orphaned niece, taken in after the car crash that stole my parents. On paper, we were step-cousins at best, connected by a marriage between two widowed people who’d somehow found each other against all odds.
In practice, we were sisters. The kind that mattered more than blood.
Theresa and Patrick had built a household so big and chaotic that nobody bothered with labels. Sixteen kids, three last names, and a sprawling California house that was always too loud and never had enough bathrooms. Maggie was three years older,which at eight and eleven had felt like a decade. She’d been the one who braided my hair before school because Theresa was already dealing with fourteen other crises by 7 AM. She was the one who climbed into my bed during thunderstorms, not because I asked, but because she knew.
She’d been mine since the first night I’d slept in her room at age two, still not old enough to understand that my parents were gone, only understanding that there was a girl with a serious face who’d given me her stuffed rabbit and said, “You can have Mr. Whiskers. I’m too old for him anyway.”
She wasn’t too old. She was five. But she’d seen a scared little girl and made a choice, and that choice had never changed.
Now she was sitting on a fire escape in Manhattan, handing me coffee with the same quiet determination she’d had at five, and I could feel the conversation coming like weather.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“You’re not sleeping. You’re barely eating. You leave the apartment before dawn and come back looking like you’ve been fighting someone.” She sipped her coffee. “Who are you fighting, Rose?”
“Nobody.”
“Yourself, then.” She set her mug down. “You’re allowed to be broken, Rose. You’re not allowed to disappear.”
My jaw tightened. “I’m not disappearing.”
“You don’t talk to Drake. You barely talk to me. You turned down Fury’s call yesterday. Fury, who would walk into traffic for you.”Maggie’s voice wasn’t angry. It was worse than angry. It was afraid. “You’re shutting down. I’ve seen it before. I did it myself, with my ex, Dale, when things got bad. You pull everything inward and you go quiet and you convince yourself that if you just stop needing things, the pain will stop.”
“Maggie—”
“It doesn’t stop.” Her hand found mine. “It just goes somewhere you can’t reach it. And then one day you wake up and you’ve been numb for so long you’ve forgotten what feeling anything was like.”
I stared at the city. Yellow cabs. Steam rising from grates. A woman walking a dog that was bigger than she was. All of it impossibly loud and alive and indifferent to the fact that I was sitting on a fire escape trying not to fall apart.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said.
“Do what?”
“Start over.” My voice cracked. “I had a ranch, horses and a business and a best friend and a—” I stopped. Swallowed. “And now I have a suitcase and a guest room and I don’t know who I am without any of it.”
Maggie was quiet for a moment. Then she squeezed my hand.
“You’re Rose Gracen,” she said. “You’re the woman who built a ranch from nothing when everyone said you couldn’t. Who rescued horses nobody else wanted and turned them into therapy animals.” She paused. “You’re also the woman who fell in love with someone and shoved him out the door because you were too scared to need him.”
I pulled my hand back. “Fury told you.”
“Fury told me enough.” Maggie’s voice was careful now, choosing her words in a way that told me she knew she was on thin ice. “He didn’t give me details. Just that there was a man at the ranch. That you cared about him. And that it ended badly around the same time everything else fell apart.”
