And then another.
And then she's close enough that I can see the freckles on her nose. Her mother's freckles. God, hermother's freckles—and she's shaking and I'm shaking and I put my arms around my daughter for the first time in her life.
She's solid. Real. Alive.
Twenty years of moments I'll never get back compressed into the weight of her against my chest, her fingers gripping the back of my shirt like she's afraid I'll disappear.
I hold on.
I hold on like the ground is moving beneath us and she's the only fixed point in the world.
And somewhere underneath the shock and the grief, the rage is building.
Rage at Marlena, at the years, at every single day I didn't know this girl existed.
There's something else. Something that feels like a door opening in a room I thought was sealed shut.
The bay mare nickers behind us. The barn light goes gold to amber to dusk.
My daughter is crying in my arms and I am wrecked beyond any pain I've ever known.
And Marlena, wherever the fuck she is, has a debt she cannot begin to imagine.
CHAPTER TWO
Marlena
I check Presley's location the way I've checked it every morning since she left for her internship—coffee in one hand, phone in the other, thumb already swiping before my brain catches up.
It's a habit. Not helicopter parenting, not paranoia.
Just a mother's reflex, the same way I used to check the locks before bed when she was little.
She's twenty years old. She's an adult. She can take care of herself.
But she's also angry at me.
She has been for weeks, since I sat her down at the kitchen table and told her the truth I've been carrying for her entire life.
And when your daughter is angry at you and three hundred miles away at a summer internship she was deliberately vague about, you check the damn location.
The pin loads and I stare at it.
Then I set my coffee downverycarefully, because my hands have started shaking and I don't want to spill it on the counter.
Sharp Shooter Ranch. Sharp, Texas.
Shedidn't.
I zoom in.
The pin is precise—not on a road, not at a gas station, not passing through.
She'sonthe ranch.
She's been on the ranch since—I scroll back through the location history—five days ago.
Five days. My daughter has been on Harlan Lyle's ranch for five days and I didn't know.
