“Really good, actually.” He leaned against the doorframe. “She’s been leaving stuff at my place. Toothbrush, extra clothes. Didn’t even ask, just started doing it.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“More than okay.”
His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen and straightened. “I gotta go. Grace needs help with something at the B&B. Her hot water heater’s been acting up again.”
Grace Lin. She ran the Mountain View B&B on the edge of town, a place her grandmother had built decades ago. She and Owen had been friends since high school, the kind of friendship that survived time and distance and everything in between. Saturday morning breakfasts, inside jokes, the easy shorthand of people who’d known each other half their lives.
“Tell her I said hi,” I said.
“Will do.” He paused at the door. “Think about what I said. About telling Riley. Before you run out of time to say it.”
He was gone before I could say anything else.
I finished my coffee alone, thinking about what he’d said. About doubt and forward motion and sitting still. About Riley, asleep down the hall, and whether I had the courage to risk what we’d built on three words that could change everything.
The next afternoon found me in the north pasture with Riley, replacing a stretch of fence that should have been fixed two years ago. The posts had rotted through, the wire sagging in places, the whole thing a testament to how much I’d let slide after Gran died.
Riley didn’t comment on the disrepair. Just grabbed the post-hole digger and got to work.
We’d developed a rhythm over the past weeks. Physical work had become our language, the thing we did when words felt too heavy or too dangerous. She handed me tools before I asked. I steadied posts while she tamped dirt. We moved around each other like we’d been doing this for years instead of months.
The sun beat down, unseasonably warm for late fall. I watched Riley drive another post into the ground, her movements efficient, practiced. She’d taken to ranch work faster than I’d expected—faster than Claire ever had.
Claire had spent plenty of time at the ranch over the years we were together. Weekends when she could get away from the firm, holidays when Denver felt too crowded, the occasional Tuesday night when she’d driven out just to see me. She’d had a hook for her coat by the door, a drawer in my dresser, a spot at the kitchen table that was hers.
But she’d never grabbed a post-hole digger. Never offered to help with fencing or feeding or any of the hundred small tasks that kept this place alive. The ranch was where I lived, not something she wanted to be part of. A backdrop to our relationship, not a foundation for it.
Riley was different. She dug fence posts like it mattered—like she mattered to the land. Like she understood this wasn’tjust acreage and wire, but legacy. Memory. The physical outline of everything my family had built, lost, and built again with blistered hands and stubborn hope.
I caught myself watching her instead of the fence line. The set of her shoulders. The way she leaned into the work, efficient and uncomplaining, as if effort itself was a language she trusted more than words. Something in my chest tightened, sharp and unwelcome.
“You’re staring.”
I blinked. She’d stopped working, one eyebrow lifted, sweat darkening her hairline, sunlight catching on her skin.
“Sorry.” The word came out rougher than I meant. “Just… thinking.”
“Dangerous habit.” She swiped her forearm across her forehead and nodded toward the ground. “Hand me the wire stretcher?”
I passed it to her. Our fingers brushed—barely there, a split second of contact.
She didn’t flinch.
Three months ago, she would have. Back then, any accidental touch sent her recoiling like she’d been burned. Now she just took the tool and turned back to the fence, focused, unbothered. Like touching me was normal. Like it didn’t cost her anything to let it happen.
That was the part that scared me.
Because it cost me. Every time. A quiet jolt under the ribs. A warmth I didn’t know how to set down. I watched her work, the ease of it, the trust she wasn’t even aware she was showing.
I was in trouble.
Deep, irreversible trouble.
Break time came around two, the sun high and hot, both of us ready to collapse. We sat on the tailgate of my truck, water bottles sweating in the afternoon heat, legs dangling, shoulders almost touching.
The mountains rose purple in the distance. Between here and there, pastures rolled gold with late-season grass, dotted with the dark shapes of cattle from the neighboring ranch. A hawk circled overhead, riding thermals, patient and precise.
