I sat on the bunkhouse porch the night after the dinner, Sully's head in my lap, and let the memory sit without flinching. That was new. Usually when the Clearwater memories came, I shut them down—packed them away, kept moving, found something to do with my hands. But tonight I let them stay.
Sarah would have loved the Blackwoods. Would have been in the kitchen with Louisa by six a.m., volunteering to prep, getting recruited into the cornbread assembly line. She'd have matchedClay joke for joke and won. She'd have pulled Hunter out of his corner with sheer persistence, because Sarah never met a quiet person she didn't consider a personal challenge.
And she'd have been ruthless about Maggie.
She's out of your league, Jackie.The nickname I'd hated, the voice I'd give anything to hear again.Way too smart, way too pretty, way too together. How'd you trick her into looking at you twice?
"I didn't trick her."
Must be the strong, silent thing. Some women go for that. Personally, I think you're just bad at conversation.
I smiled. Imaginary conversations with my dead sister probably weren't healthy. But they were the closest I could get to having her with me, and right now—sitting on a porch in Texas, thinking about roots for the first time in four years—I needed her voice in my head.
"What do you think, Sar?" I asked the dark. "Am I crazy?"
Silence. The kind that had texture—wind, crickets, the distant settling of cattle.
But somewhere inside that silence, I could feel her answer.
No. You're finally being brave.
I'd been at Blackwood Ranch for almost two weeks.
Maggie and I had found a rhythm. During the day, we were employer and employee—professional distance, clipped exchanges, eye contact rationed like water in a drought. At night, when the ranch was quiet and the pretending got too heavy, one of us would break. Sometimes I walked to her porch and waited. Sometimes she caught my eye across the yard—a flicker beneath the professional mask, gone so fast you'd miss it if you weren't watching for exactly that.
I was always watching.
Those hours behind her closed door had become the truest part of my day. Not just the physical—though the way sheresponded when she finally stopped thinking and let her body lead was something I'd carry for the rest of my life. It was the after. The quiet. The conversations that happened in the dark when the walls were down, and she was too spent to rebuild them.
The horses helped me think. They always had.
I spent the morning working with the mare who'd been favoring her left foreleg. The new shoeing had helped, and she was moving easier now, trusting the footing, trusting me. By noon, she was letting me handle the leg without bracing.
Progress. Slow and earned. The only kind that held.
What Maggie had said at the dessert table had been sitting in my chest for two days. She wanted something real. Something she could have in daylight. She just didn't know how to reach for it.
And I was starting to realize that patience—my great strategy, my only play—might not be enough. That waiting for Maggie to choose this on her own might mean waiting forever, because she'd been putting herself last for so long it had become reflex.
Maybe what she needed wasn't someone who waited.
Maybe what she needed was someone who built.
The idea had been forming for days. Maybe longer. Maybe since the truck ride to Driscoll, when we'd spent ninety minutes talking about bloodlines and breeding strategy, and I'd watched her come alive in a way she never did when she was managing cattle counts and irrigation schedules.
The Raven Spur stallion at Fort Worth. Juniper, the blue roan mare at Driscoll, with the quiet eye and the upright pasterns. Dancer, coming along beautifully under consistent work. The breeding program Maggie had been building in spreadsheets and daydreams for years, always pushed to thebottom of the priority list because someone else's need came first.
What if it didn't have to stay at the bottom?
The inheritance was still sitting in those accounts. My family's legacy, converted to numbers I'd never touched because touching them meant accepting they were gone. But what if there was another way to think about it? Not blood money. Not guilt. A foundation. Something my parents built that could become something new—a breeding operation that honored everything Dad knew about horses and everything Sarah would have wanted me to do with my life.
I'd seen the land east of Copper Creek. Good soil, good water access, enough acreage for a real program. Not Blackwood land—adjacent to it. Close enough to partner, far enough to be its own thing.
A breeding program built from the ground up. The kind of thing I'd been doing for other people's ranches for four years, never for myself, because building something of your own meant staying somewhere long enough to lose it.
Dad would have asked sharp questions about the business plan. Would have played devil's advocate, poked holes, and eventually nodded with that quiet approval that said more than any words.
Mom would have just been glad I'd stopped moving.
