“You’re good,” I said, voice gruff.
He laughed, nervous but thrilled, and looked down at me with pure, unfiltered joy. “Thank you,” he said. “For letting me stay.”
I shrugged, trying to play it off. “Like I said. You work, you stay.”
But the truth was, I wanted him here. Not just for the bread, or the repairs, or the encyclopedic knowledge of pastureland, but for the way he made the house feel like a home again. For the way he looked at me—not with fear, but with hope.
He rode a few unsteady circles in the yard, then nearly fell getting down. I caught him, steadied him with both hands, and he looked up at me, breathless.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” I answered, and meant it.
He let go, took a step back, but didn’t run. Instead, he walked inside, head high, like he finally belonged.
I watched him go, then looked out across the ranch. Five thousand acres of wild, waiting potential. My future, if I wanted it.
I did.
And for the first time, I wasn’t alone.
Chapter Three
~ Jojo ~
That first night after spending the whole day with Rawley, I thought I’d sleep like the dead. Instead, I lay in the dark, eyes wide as quarter-moons, the ceiling flickering in and out of focus every time a wind gust swept the curtains.
The room was freezing, but it was the kind of cold I’d have killed for in my squatter days—clean, dry, high country cold that smelled like cedar and old plaster. Not the kind of chill you got when you slept in a car, or in someone’s unfinished basement, damp and close and full of other people’s anger.
I’d picked this bedroom weeks before Rawley ever showed up, mostly because it was the least haunted: no leftover kid posters, no lipstick stains on the glass, just bare white walls and a window that caught morning light like a net.
In the first week, I’d laundered everything with baking soda and vinegar, scrubbed the baseboards with a toothbrush, and spent hours picking the dead flies out of the window track. I’d washed the curtains twice, trying to erase the smell of mouse droppings and pipe tobacco.
None of it felt like it belonged to me, then or now.
The bed itself was a queen, which made no sense in a room barely bigger than a walk-in closet. Its iron headboard clanged every time I shifted, and the mattress was the kind of foam that remembered every weight and curve.
I lay on top of the covers, tracing the stitched edge of the blanket with my thumb, feeling the day’s dirt still stuck in the cuticles of my index finger.
Even with the weight of the house above me and the knowledge that I was, for the first time in years, sleeping inside on purpose, I couldn’t shake the conviction that someone wouldburst through the door any second and drag me out by the wrists.
I wondered if Rawley was sleeping, or if he was lying awake, too. The guy made it sound like he didn’t care about anything, but I’d seen the way he did a perimeter check three times before locking up, the way he clicked every deadbolt and set his boots in a perfect line at the threshold.
Nobody just happened to be that careful.
I rolled onto my back, staring at the ghost-pale paint on the ceiling. The moon dragged slow through the window, laying shadows of tree limbs over the floor in a patchwork that didn’t look real.
I kept waiting for the old panic to settle in—the certainty that someone would find out I didn’t belong, that they’d see right through my act and call the sheriff or, worse, my father.
Instead, there was just this restless energy, like my blood was buzzing at twice the usual speed.
It’d been a long time since anyone offered me anything without expecting something in return. Even the bakery job came with a silent addendum: Don’t fuck up, don’t be weird, don’t talk about where you sleep at night. Rawley’s offer—work, stay, eat—was so straightforward it bordered on threatening.
I didn’t know how to process it. Did he mean it? Was this a trick, or a test? Was I supposed to be grateful, or just perform gratitude until he got bored and told me to leave?
My mind kept replaying the moment after dinner, when he told me I could have the room for as long as I pulled my weight. His voice had been flat, almost bored, but there was something underneath it—an edge of warning, maybe, or a challenge. You work, you stay. You don’t, you go.
I pulled the covers up to my nose, inhaled the faint scent of detergent and sun-dried cotton. My hands itched to be busy—scrubbing, mending, planting—but there was nothing to fix hereexcept myself. I wanted to believe that maybe this was the start of something good. That if I was careful, if I kept my head down and didn’t ask for too much, maybe I could make it last more than a week.
