I turned and led Brutus back through the broken fence without looking back. I didn’t need to. I could feel Graham watching me the same way I could feel a shift in barometric pressure. Invisible. Undeniable.
Hank was waiting at the fence with repair supplies and the expression of a man who’d seen everything and would say almost nothing.
“Nice catch,” he said to Graham.
“Nice horse,” Graham replied.
Hank glanced at me. I didn’t meet his eyes.
I walked Brutus back to the barn with my scraped palms stinging and my pulse still running too fast and the taste of something reckless sitting in the back of my throat like a dare.
I was in so much trouble.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GRAHAM
The days settledinto a rhythm I hadn’t expected.
I worked.
Not the performative kind, just actual work. The kind where you show up before dawn and do whatever Hank tells you and don’t stop until your body makes you.
Monday: fence posts. Tuesday: stall repairs and a water trough that had been leaking since August. Wednesday: hauling hay from the delivery truck to the barn, two hundred bales, until my arms felt like they’d been removed and reattached by someone who didn’t read the instructions.
I didn’t complain. Partly because complaining to Hank was like whinging to a boulder, pointless and slightly humiliating. Partly because the physical exhaustion was the only thing that shut my brain up.
Rose didn’t speak to me.
Not on Monday. Not on Tuesday. Not on Wednesday, when I passed her in the barn aisle and she looked through me like I was made of fucking glass.
But she noticed. I could tell by the small things. A stall door I’d fixed would be open when it had been closed, meaning she’d checked my work. The fence posts I’d replaced got a second coat of sealant I hadn’t applied. She was tracking what I did without acknowledging I existed.
On Thursday morning, I was brushing Brutus in the wrong direction, against the grain, apparently, which was a crime punishable by death in horse circles, and Rose appeared beside me without a sound.
“Other way,” she said.
I looked at her. She was staring at the brush, not at me.
“The hair grows this direction.” She traced a line along Brutus’s shoulder with her finger. “You go with it, not against it. Otherwise you’re just irritating him.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the horse.”
I turned to Brutus. “Sorry, mate.”
Rose’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not anywhere in the same postcode as a smile. But the muscle moved, and I caught it, and my whole day rearranged itself around that quarter-second.
She walked away without another word.
I brushed Brutus the right direction for twenty minutes and felt like I’d won the lottery.
I’d just gotten dressedafter a shower when Dex walked in with Jamie trailing behind him.
“NorthFace is gone,” Dex said. No preamble. “Email came in this morning. ‘Reassessing the partnership direction.’”
Jamie dropped into the desk chair and pulled her knees up. She looked like she hadn’t slept well in days. Not the crisis kind of tired, but the purposeless kind. The kind that came from being very good at something and suddenly not being allowed to do it.
