“Tomorrow,” she murmured. A pause. “Can I come back? To see her.”
"You can come back whenever you want."
It wasn't much. But it was a start.
The house was quiet by ten.
Riley had retreated to the guest room after helping with the dishes, murmuring something about being tired, not quite meeting my eyes. Mia had gone to bed without a word, closing her door with a soft click that felt louder than a slam.
And I was alone with the silence I'd lived in for years, except now it was different. Now there were people on the other side of these walls. People I was responsible for. People whose presence changed the shape of every room.
I lay in bed and listened to the house settle around me. The creak of old boards, the groan of the foundation—sounds I'd grown up with and barely noticed anymore. But tonight I noticed. Tonight, everything felt amplified.
Through the wall, I heard Riley pacing.
Soft footsteps, back and forth, back and forth. Restless energy that couldn't find an outlet. I pictured her in the guest room, surrounded by unfamiliar walls, trying to convince herself she'd made the right choice.
I knew that feeling. I'd been living with it for days.
This wasn't how I'd pictured filling this house. Claire had been the face of every dream for three years. Now she was in Denver building the life she'd actually wanted, and I was listening to my coworker pace in the guest room. A woman I'd worked beside for two years but never really known. A woman who was now, legally, my wife.
The pacing stopped. Silence settled, thin and watchful. Then Riley’s door eased open, the hinge protesting under its breath.Her steps followed in the hallway—measured, careful, as if the floor might object.
The bathroom door closed with a muted click. A pause. Water came on low, steady, the kind meant not to carry. Pipes rattled once, then quieted. Small sounds, deliberate ones. Someone moving through a house that wasn’t hers yet, trying not to leave a mark.
I stared at the ceiling, breath shallow, listening to the house settle around me. Sleep stayed just out of reach.
This was supposed to be an arrangement. A fix. Words on a page, boxes checked, a solution that made sense in daylight but unraveled in the dark.
But lying there in the dark, listening to them struggle through their first night under my roof, I felt the weight of something bigger than I'd bargained for. I'd wanted a wife on paper. What I'd gotten was two people in my house, in my life, filling up the silence I'd grown so used to.
I kept telling myself Riley and Mia weren’t family. Not really. Just names on the same paperwork. A temporary shape. A year, maybe less. Then we’d go back to being coworkers who passed each other in the hallway, small nods, nothing owed. That was the plan. That was the deal.
Intentions had a way of warping once real people entered the equation. And something about the sound of Mia's small voice asking to come back to the barn, about Riley's restless pacing through an unfamiliar house, made me wonder if I'd miscalculated. If I'd signed up for something simple and stumbled into something that could hurt.
I wasn't ready for that. Wasn't sure I'd ever be ready.
But ready or not, they were here. And tomorrow, we'd have to figure out how to live in the same space without tripping over each other. How to be a family that wasn't a family. How topretend this was real enough to fool the courts without letting it become real enough to matter.
The house shifted around me, wood creaking, beams sighing. My body gave in before my mind did, the weight of the day finally winning. My eyes closed.
For tonight, it was enough that we were all under the same roof.
It had to be enough.
CHAPTER 6
Riley
The first weekat the ranch blurred together. Long shifts at the station. Coming home. Sleeping in a room that smelled like lavender and old wood instead of mildew and exhaust and whatever chemicals past tenants had used to fake clean.
I’d lived everywhere and nowhere. Apartments with thin walls and loud fights at 2 AM.Rentals with stains on the ceiling and locks you didn’t trust. I never stayed long. Leases ended. Rent rose. And staying too long never felt smart.
Roots were risky. Roots meant loss.
This place didn’t play by those rules. The ranch stretched out in every direction. Too much space. Too much quiet. The guest room alone was bigger than the place Mia and I had shared in town. High ceilings. Real light. Hallways wide enough that you didn’t have to shrink yourself to exist.
It felt wrong. Like an administrative error.
