And Sarah would have said,It's about damn time, Jackie.
The thought settled into me like a stone dropping into deep water. Not urgent. Not impulsive. Just solid. Certain. The kind of knowing that lived in your bones before your brain caught up.
I didn't have a plan yet. Didn't have numbers or timelines or anything resembling a proposal. What I had was a direction—and for a man who'd spent four years without one, that was enough.
That night, I didn't go to Maggie's cabin.
Not because I didn't want to. But because I needed to sit with this—the breeding program, the land, the inheritance, the full weight of what it meant to stop drifting and choose something.
Choose someone.
Sully lay beside me on the porch, his body warm against my leg. The ranch was quiet. Stars thick overhead, the kind of sky you only got out here, honest and enormous.
Somewhere across the property, a light burned in Maggie's window. She was probably at her desk, working on the proposal that was due Thursday. Building her dream in spreadsheets at midnight because that was the only time she had to herself.
I wanted to walk over there. Wanted to sit across from her and tell her about the land east of town. About the accounts I'd never touched. About the program we could build together—her instincts, my experience, genetics and patience and something that could grow into a legacy of its own.
But she wasn't ready to hear it. Not yet. I had to show her first. Not with words—with staying. With being the man who was still here when the easy thing would have been to go.
Sully lifted his head, looked at me, and thumped his tail once against the porch boards.
"Yeah, Sul." I scratched behind his ears. "I know."
I sat there until the light in Maggie's window went dark. Then a while longer, letting the night settle, letting the certainty take root.
Tomorrow, I'd go to her. Tomorrow, we'd work side by side the way we did every day—professional, careful, the electricity between us banked but never out.
And soon—not yet, but soon—I'd tell her what I was building. What I wanted to build with her.
For now, it was enough to know the direction.
For now, it was enough to have finally stopped running.
12
Maggie
Three weeks.
That's how long it took for the thing with Jack to become routine.
I didn't mean for it to happen. Didn't plan for the nights he showed up at my cabin to start feeling less like lapses in judgment and more like appointments. Expected. Anticipated. The part of my day I actually looked forward to, if I was being honest with myself.
Which I wasn't.
Being honest with myself would mean admitting that I'd completely lost control of this situation. That what started as a pressure valve had become something with weight and shape and a heartbeat of its own. That I spent my days counting hours until dark, until I could stop performing, until I could have him again.
So I didn't admit it. I rationalized instead.
It's just physical. It's just convenient. It's just two adults meeting a mutual need.
The lies got easier to tell with practice.
The ranch was busier than ever.
North pasture clearing was underway—equipment rumbling across the land from dawn to dusk, contractors everywhere. The irrigation infrastructure was coming together piece by piece, trenches dug, pipes laid, the skeleton of Ivy's cattle expansion taking shape in the dirt.
I managed it all. Coordinated the contractors, adjusted timelines, solved the hundred small problems that cropped up every day. When a delivery truck got stuck in the mud near the creek, I organized the extraction. When pipe specs came back wrong—again—I spent two hours on the phone with the supplier until it was sorted. When Dale, the irrigation contractor, tried to cut a corner on the north junction valve, I walked him back to the trench and stood there until he did it right.
