“You left me a mess,” I said, and my throat tightened, but I didn’t let it break.
The air didn’t answer. The house didn’t creak in response either. So I kept going, because apparently I was the only one who could.
“I’ve got two choices,” I told him, tapping the table twice like it could anchor me. “I fight for this, or I don’t. I stay, and I bleed for it, or I cut it loose before it bleeds me dry.”
I shifted papers, lined them up, tried to make the chaos look orderly enough that I could stand to look at it. The numbers didn’t soften. They didn’t care that I’d grown up feeding calves behind this barn or that my first scar hadcome from this property or that I’d learned to swear in this kitchen when I was too young for it.
The numbers stayed sharp.
My jaw ached from clenching.
“Wyatt’s offer would fix it,” I whispered, and the words tasted like betrayal even though they were true. “It’d solve the immediate problem. It’d stop the auction and the vultures and the phone calls.”
I saw his face in my mind without asking for it.
The way he looked when he found me, like he held his breath for days and only exhaled when I was safe. The scrape on his knuckle. The exhaustion under his calm. His hand on my knee in the truck, heavy and steady, like he was telling my body it was allowed to exist.
It wasn’t the time for that memory. It wasn’t fair. It made everything tilt. I shoved the thought away and focused on the table.
“But if I sell,” I said, firmer now, “I lose it. I lose the land, what you built. I lost what you wanted.”
Did I actually know what he’d wanted?
Not the version I’d built in my head. Not the myth of Ray Callahan, stubborn rancher, silent guardian, man who never asked for help and never offered softness.
The real man.
The one who’d written a list that included telling me he was proud, like it was just another chore he’d get to when the weather cleared.
Call Tessa. Ask about her job. Tell her I’m proud.
I stared at the table until my eyes stung.
“You didn’t even get to that,” I said, and the steadiness in my voice slipped. Just a fraction. “You died before you could do the one thing I needed you to do.”
My chest tightened hard enough I had to bend forward,elbows on the table, forehead hovering above the papers like I might drop into them and vanish.
I breathed through my nose.
In. Out.
In. Out.
The way I used to before a hard case at work, when a dog was snarling, and an owner was crying, and I had to be the calm one because nobody else could.
I was always the calm one and I didn’t want to be that one anymore.
“I don’t know what you thought you were protecting,” I said quietly. “But you didn’t protect me. You just left me alone with it.”
The silence stayed.
My eyes slid to the far end of the counter, to the corner where Ray kept the mail sorted with a stubborn sort of logic only he understood. A small wooden rack with slots labelled in his uneven scrawl. Feed. Vet. Taxes.
I pushed back from the table and stood. My legs felt heavy, like my bones were filled with sand. I walked to the rack and ran my fingers along the edges, then opened the drawer beneath it.
It stuck, like it always had. Ray had meant to sand it down for years and never bothered.
I yanked harder. The drawer gave with a groan, and the sound made my skin prickle. Inside was the usual chaos. Old receipts. Elastics. A flashlight. A pocketknife. A folded map of the county that looked like it’d been opened and closed a thousand times.
