I knew she was at a ranch.
She told me that much, in the clipped, careful sentences she's been using since the truth came out.
Got a summer internship. Cattle operation. Starts next week.
She didn't say where.
I didn't ask because I was trying to give her space, trying not to push, trying to be the mother who respects her daughter's boundaries even when those boundaries feel like punishment.
She went tohim.
I sit down on the kitchen floor.
Not because I decide to—because my legs stop working.
The tile is cold through my pajama pants and my phone screen is still glowing with that little pin, that precise digital marker on the property of the man I've spent twenty-one years keeping my daughter away from.
Presley is on Sharp Shooter Ranch.
Presley is working for Harlan Lyle.
And either she hasn't told him who she is yet, or she has, and both make me want to throw up.
If she hasn't told him, she will.
I know my daughter.
She didn't go to Sharp to look at cattle.
She went to see her father.
To study him. To decide if the man matches the story I told her.
And when she's ready—when she's gathered enough data, because Presley approaches everything like a research project—she'll tell him.
If she already has…
I can't think about that.
I can't think about Harlan's face when a twenty-year-old girl with red hair and his jawline tells him she's his daughter.
I can't think about what he'll do next.
I'm off the floor in thirty seconds.
Bedroom. Suitcase. Clothes.
Doesn't matter what, just enough.
Toiletries. Phone charger. The folder in my desk drawer with Presley's birth certificate and the paperwork I've kept for twenty years in case this day ever came, because some part of me always knew it would.
I'm in my car in seven minutes.
I haven't brushed my hair. I haven't locked the front door.
I haven't called anyone because there's no one to call—Mitch is dead, my parents are strangers, and the only person who could talk me through this is the twenty-year-old girl I'm driving toward.
The highway opens up in front of me, and I point the car south.
