I’d been lying awake for hours, running through everything Olivia and I had found, everything I couldn’t say, every way thiswas going to get worse before it got better. Sleep wasn’t coming. I pulled on boots and a jacket and stepped outside for air.
The barn light was on.
Not the overheads. Just the single warm bulb above Cassiopeia’s stall. The one Rose left on during storms so the horses wouldn’t be in total darkness.
There wasn’t a storm tonight. Just a clear sky, cold stars, and the woman I loved sitting on the floor of her horse’s stall with her arms wrapped around her knees.
I stopped in the barn doorway.
She wasn’t crying. That would have been easier to witness. She was just sitting, motionless, staring at nothing, her face slack with exhaustion that goes past tired into something emptier. Cassiopeia stood over her like a guardian, head low, muzzle resting near Rose’s shoulder.
Everything in me wanted to go to her. Cross the barn, sit down beside her, pull her into my arms the way I had a few nights ago when the world still felt survivable. Tell her I cared about her. Tell her I knew about Denise. What I’d overheard. Tell her I was going to fix all of it if she’d just let me.
But she hadn’t asked me to come.
She hadn’t asked me for anything. Hadn’t come to my cabin, hadn’t reached for me, hadn’t met my eyes across the kitchen the way she’d done that morning after, the morning when Kaya had grinned and thrown dish towels and Rose had blushed like a woman who’d forgotten she was allowed to be happy.
That felt like a year ago.
I stood in the dark and watched her breathe. Watched Cassiopeia shift her weight and nudge Rose’s hair. Watched the woman who’d built this place from nothing sit on the floor of it and try to figure out how to survive losing everything.
I couldn’t fix this from here. I couldn’t fix it by holding her or loving her or offering money she’d never take. The photographers were my fault. The media was my fault. And Denise was still circling, still performing, still dismantling Rose’s life one blow at a time.
And I couldn’t prove it.
Not yet.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ROSE
I was doing routine work,the kind of task that required just enough focus to keep my brain from spiraling, when Graham found me in the barn.
“Hey,” Graham said from the stall doorway.
I didn’t look up. “Hey.”
He leaned against the frame. I could feel him watching me the way he’d been watching me for weeks. That steady attention that used to make me feel seen and now just felt like pressure.
“Did you eat?” he asked.
“Not hungry.”
“Rose.”
“I said I’m not hungry.”
I heard the creak of leather as he stepped into the stall and crouched beside me. His hand covered mine, warm, gentle, the same hand that had been tangled in my hair two nights ago whilehe whispered things against my throat that still made my skin flush when I thought about them.
“Talk to me,” he said quietly.
“About what? The seventy-two thousand dollars? The shell companies? The fact that my accountant just told me half my vendor payments went to businesses that might not exist?” I kept my voice even. “Which part would you like to discuss?”
“Any of it. All of it.” His thumb traced a circle on the back of my hand. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
I looked at him then, and that was my mistake.
Because Graham wasn’t just offering comfort. He wasthere, in a way that was impossible to ignore. Solid and warm and looking at me with those gray-green eyes like I was the only thing in the world worth paying attention to. And my body, my stupid, traitorous body, responded before my brain could stop it.
