She's eating eggs and reading something on her phone. Quiet. Self-contained. Not looking around the way most people do in a small-town diner, checking to see who's watching. She doesn't care who's watching. She's just eating breakfast.
"She's good," I say, mostly to myself.
Dakota follows my gaze. Her eyebrows go up.
"Don't tell me you're flirting with the new intern, Pops."
"God, no. She's young enough to be my daughter."
Dakota takes a sip of her orange juice and looks at the ceiling.
"Hasn't stopped you before," she mumbles.
The words land like a slap I wasn't expecting. Because she's right—and she's talking about something specific, something twenty-one years old that this family has never fully addressed.
The girl I was with during the separation. The one Jolene blamed for everything. The one I pushed away because I knew,even then, that I was too old and too broken and too dangerous for a nineteen-year-old girl with her whole life ahead of her.
Grace gives Dakota a warning look. Dakota shrugs and takes a sip of her orange juice.
"Just saying," she says.
I don't respond, because what am I going to say?
She's not wrong. She's never wrong about the things that hurt. She just delivers them like she's reading the weather.
The food comes and we all eat. The baby fusses and Grace handles it with the ease of a woman who's been doing this for months now, settling him against her shoulder and eating one-handed.
Dakota steals more of Grace's bacon. I drink my coffee, watch my daughters be sisters, and try not to think about the things Dakota just dragged into the light.
The intern pays her bill and leaves without looking our way.
I watch her go and something nags at me.
I don’t know what, but it’s there.
***
The barn is quiet at the end of the day.
This is my favorite hour on the ranch.
The one after the hands have gone home and the horses are fed and the light turns amber through the barn doors.
I'm checking the quarantine stalls, running my hand along the neck of a bay mare Banshee brought in last month. She's coming along. Filling out. Starting to trust the hand instead of flinching from it.
I hear footsteps in the aisle. Not boots—sneakers. Light, hesitant.
"Mr. Lyle?"
I turn and the intern is standing in the barn doorway.
Ball cap in her hands, twisting the brim the way people do when they're nervous.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders—that deep red catching the gold light—and her face is doing something I can't read.
"Presley." I nod. "Good work today. That heifer in the drainage ditch, you did a great job handling it."
"Thank you." She swallows, but doesn't move from the doorway.
