People who've lost things know what absence sounds like in another person's voice.
"The screen door," I said, half to myself.
"What?"
"At Clearwater. The screen door on the kitchen never latched right. Mom asked Dad to fix it every summer for twenty years. He'd say 'this weekend' and then never get around to it. Sarah and I used to bet on how many times Mom would ask before she just fixed it herself."
"Did she?"
"Never. I think she liked having something to nag him about. Kept things interesting." I looked out the window. "After theywere gone, I went back to the house to pack things up. The screen door was the first thing I heard when I walked up the porch. Still broken. Still banging in the wind."
I stopped. That was further than I'd meant to go. The screen door was the detail that always undid me—the small, stupid, ordinary thing that proved they weren't coming back to fix it.
Maggie reached over and turned the radio down. Not off—just low enough that the quiet felt intentional. A gesture that said,I'm herewithout saying anything at all.
We drove in silence for a while after that. Not awkward. Not heavy. Just two people sitting with something honest between them.
It was the closest I'd felt to another person since Brad died.
The Driscoll ranch was a tidy operation run by a man named Walt Keeney, who had a white mustache, a firm handshake, and the immediate assumption that Maggie and I were together.
"Good to see a young couple taking the breeding game seriously," he said as he led us toward the mare pasture, and I watched Maggie's spine go rigid.
"We're not a couple," she said, too fast and too sharp. "He works for my family's ranch. I'm the operations manager."
Walt blinked, unfazed. "My apologies, ma'am. No offense meant."
"None taken."
I said nothing. Kept my expression neutral. But I could feel Maggie's irritation radiating off her like heat from sunbaked asphalt, and I had to work not to smile.
The mare was worth the drive.
Her name was Juniper—a seven-year-old blue roan with clean legs, a deep chest, and the kind of quiet eye that told you she'd seen enough of the world to have opinions about it. She stood for our inspection without fuss, turning when asked, picking up feet without resistance.
"Conformation's solid," Maggie said, running her hand down Juniper's near foreleg. "Bone's good. Pasterns are a little upright but within range."
"The upright pasterns could be an issue for long working days," I said, crouching to look closer. "More concussion transfer. She'd need careful footing management."
Maggie straightened. "You think that's a dealbreaker?"
"Depends on what you're breeding for. If it's arena work, no. If it's all-day ranch work on rocky terrain, it's a conversation."
"Our terrain isn't rocky. It's grass and clay."
"Then the pasterns are manageable. But I'd want to see how it expresses in her foals. Do we know anything about the dam's foot structure?"
We went back and forth like that for twenty minutes, circling the mare, debating finer points of conformation and genetics with the kind of focused intensity that probably looked obsessive from the outside. Maggie argued for Juniper's hip angle. I pushed back on her shoulder layback. She countered with the dam's proven foal record. I brought up the sire's tendency to throw heavy heads.
It was the most fun I'd had in months.
Not because we agreed—we didn't, on half of it. But because Maggie fought fair. She listened to my points, conceded when the evidence warranted it, and pushed back hard when it didn't. No ego. No posturing. Just two people who knew horses trying to make the best call.
Walt watched us from the fence rail, sipping coffee with an amused expression that said he'd revised his "not a couple" assessment exactly zero percent.
"What's your verdict?" he asked when we finally stepped back.
Maggie looked at me. I looked at her. Something passed between us that didn't need words—a consensus built from thirty minutes of honest argument.
