I’d sat there, hands wrapped around a water glass I didn’t need, listening as my future crumbled politely across from me. She’d talked about timing. About growth. About how sometimes love wasn’t enough when paths diverged.
I’d driven two hours each way, every weekend I could manage, for three years. I’d believed her when she said soon. Eventually. When the timing’s right.
The timing had never been wrong for her. She’d just been waiting for the courage to leave.
The drive home had been a blur of headlights and asphalt and tears I refused to let fall. Gran’s ring had been in my pocket, heavy as a stone. The ring she’d worn for fifty-three years. The one she’d pressed into my palm after Claire and I got engaged, eyes bright and knowing.
“For the woman who chooses this life with you,” she’d said.
Claire had worn it for eight months. I’d thought it meant she was choosing me. This life. This ranch. Everything.
The highway had blurred through tears I refused to let fall. I'd pulled over twice—once to throw up, once to scream at the empty night until my throat went raw. By the time I reached the ranch, I felt hollowed out, scooped clean of everything soft.
I hadn't touched that ring since then. It was in my sock drawer, buried under things I didn't look at anymore. Waiting for a woman who could stay.
A woman who'd want this—the early mornings and the endless work, the smell of hay and horse, the small-town life that Claire had found so suffocating. A woman who'd look at everything I had to offer and decide it was enough.
I didn’t know if she existed.
My phone rang while I was mucking out Dusty's stall, and I almost ignored it. But the screen showed Patricia Chen, and she never called unless something was wrong.
"Liam." Her voice carried the weight of thirty years handling Murphy family business. She'd drawn up my parents' will, settled my grandmother's estate, watched me grow from a scrawny kid into whatever I was at the moment. "I'm afraid I have some difficult news."
I leaned the pitchfork against the stall wall. "What kind?"
"The kind that involves a deadline." She paused, the way she always did before delivering a blow. "You will turn thirty in three months."
"I'm aware."
"Which means three months until the deadline in your grandmother's will expires."
The words landed somewhere in my chest and sat there, cold and heavy. I'd known this was coming. Had known since the reading of the will two years ago, when I'd sat in Patricia's office and heard Gran's final wishes laid out in black and white. But knowing and feeling were different things, and right now I felt like someone had reached into my ribcage and squeezed.
"If you're not legally married by your thirtieth birthday," Patricia continued, "the ranch transfers to your cousin Derek. I've already fielded calls from developers through his people. He'll sell before the ink dries on the deed, Liam. You know that."
I knew. Derek hadn't set foot on Murphy land in fifteen years, had made it abundantly clear that he considered ranching beneath him. The only value this place held for him was what he could get for it in cash.
“Your grandmother was… specific.”
Gran had believed in legacy. In family. In doing things the right way, even if it meant forcing the issue. She’d assumed I’d be married by thirty. Had probably assumed kids, too. Sunday dinners with laughter and noise and muddy boots by the door.
She hadn’t planned on me standing alone in a barn with a phone in my hand and no idea how to save the thing she’d loved most.
“Thanks for telling me,” that was what kind of thing you used to say when there was nothing else to.
Patricia's sigh crackled through the phone. "I'm sorry, Liam. I wish I had better news. But three months is what you have. If there's anything I can do?—"
"Thanks, Patricia. I'll figure something out."
I hung up before she could offer more sympathy. I stood there, alone in the barn, frozen, trying to figure things out.
Three months.
Three months to find someone willing to marry a man whose own fiancée had decided he wasn't worth the trouble. Three months to save everything my family had built, everything I'd been working to preserve since my parents' pickup truck wrapped around a tree when I was nineteen and left me an orphan overnight.
My parents had died in a farming accident—that’s what everyone called it, thoughaccidentfelt too clean, a word that didn’t match the reality. A mechanical failure on the old tractor. My father was thrown clear. My mother wasn’t. I was nineteen when it happened, finishing my first semester of communitycollege, planning to come home for the weekend. Instead, I came home for a funeral.
Gran was the one who held me together after that. We moved into the farmhouse. She took over the business side of things while I learned how to run the ranch. She taught me everything she knew—about the land, the horses, the seasons. And before she died, she made me promise I wouldn’t let it go. Never.
