I’d looked at the candles, their light flickering against the concrete walls of the bay. Made a wish I didn’t let myself name. Blew them out in one breath.
The cheering had covered the way my heart was pounding.
Patricia had come to the ranch the next morning with the paperwork. Sat at my grandmother’s kitchen table—my kitchen table now, legally, finally—and walked me through the documents that made it official. Deed transfer. Title registration. The ranch was mine.
I’d expected to feel something monumental. Relief, maybe. Triumph. The satisfaction of a promise kept.
Instead, I’d signed my name on the dotted line and felt… settled. Like a key turning in a lock that had been waiting for years. The land had always been mine in the ways that mattered. In the calluses on my hands, the ache in my back after a long day of fencing, the way I knew every hill and hollow by heart. The paperwork just made it true on paper, too.
That night, lying awake, I’d thought about my grandmother. About the condition she’d set, the impossible deadline that had seemed like cruelty at the time. Married by thirty. She’d seen too many Murphy men let the land die because they were too stubborn to build families.
But remembering Riley’s smile in the apparatus bay, the way she’d looked at me like maybe I was something worth celebrating, I’d understood something Gran had known all along: the ranch was never the point. The family was the point. The land was just the place where you built it.
I had both now. The land and the family.
The question was whether I’d get to keep the latter.
“You’ve been whistling.”
I looked up. Owen stood in the kitchen doorway, two coffees in hand, that quiet half-smile he got when he’d noticed something he wasn’t going to let go.
“Have I?”
“During drills. While restocking.” He crossed to the table and dropped into the chair across from me. “Pretty sure I heard you humming in the shower this morning.”
I thought about it. He was probably right. “Huh.”
Owen slid one of the coffees across the table. “Cal noticed too. Said he hasn’t seen you this relaxed since before Claire.”
I took the coffee. Wrapped my hands around it. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “I don’t know what to do with that.”
Owen’s expression shifted. He was still warm, but more serious now. “How’s the arrangement going?”
I took a long sip instead of answering. The coffee was terrible. Firehouse coffee always was. I drank it anyway, trying to find words for something I hadn’t said out loud yet.
Owen waited. He was good at that.
“It doesn’t feel like an arrangement anymore,” I finally admitted. “Hasn’t for a while. I don’t know when that happened. Maybe it never did. But I wake up and she’s there, and Mia’s there, and it feels like…” I trailed off, not sure how to finish.
“Like home?”
“Yeah.” The word scraped on the way out. “Like home.”
Owen nodded slowly, like he’d been waiting for me to catch up to something obvious. He didn’t look surprised.
“And does she know?”
“Know what?”
“That you’re in love with her.”
The words hit hard. Not because they were wrong, but because saying them out loud took away my last place to hide.
“I’m not…” I started, then stopped. Dragged a hand through my hair, the habit kicking in when I didn’t know where to put the feeling. “It’s complicated.”
“It always is.”
“She’s already carrying too much.” My jaw tightened. “The custody case. Todd. Mia waking up screaming in the middle of the night. She doesn’t need me adding… this.”
