He’d started naming them, too; this one was apparently Sergeant Feathers.
Back at the house, I found Macon on the roof, a tool belt slung low, his body bracketed against the peak as he fussed with the new weather station. Rawley’s idea: keep ahead of storms, track wind and rainfall, maybe even automate the irrigation someday.
I watched Macon work, hands sure and economical, every movement so precise it made you forget the man was basically a tank with opinions.
He saw me watching and gave a two-finger wave. “Mail came,” he called. “It’s on the porch.”
I nodded, then checked the front steps. Among the junk mail and feed catalogs was my notebook, which had somehow migrated outside. The goats again. There were bite marks on the cover and a smear of what I hoped was peanut butter across the first page, but the contents were safe.
I took it inside, set it on the kitchen table, and opened to the latest entry. Rotational grazing plans for spring. A page of notes on the horse’s dietary needs during the wet season. Three different sketches of a future orchard, each more ambitious than the last. It was silly, but writing it down made it seem possible, like the plans would reach into the soil and coax the future into being.
The barn, freshly painted and blazing red even through the kitchen window, anchored everything. I’d watched them do it—Macon and Burke and Rawley, stripped to their waists and arguing over brush technique, then laughing at how much paint they managed to get on each other instead of the siding.
It looked new, proud, like a warning flag to anyone driving the main road: This place is alive. And, probably, guarded by psychos.
I made breakfast—three eggs over easy, the last of the sourdough, a tomato sliced and salted till it bled juice on the plate. I sat at the table, eating slowly, the notebook propped open and a pen ready for the day’s additions.
The window above the sink looked out on the barn, the garden, the world I was starting to believe I belonged to. And, across it all, the subtle shimmer of security cameras, the motion sensors, the new perimeter lights that made the ranch glow at night like a firefly caught in glass.
I should have felt trapped, or at least wary. But the truth was, I felt safer here—strange men with guns and all—than I’d ever felt anywhere. It didn’t make sense.
Maybe it didn’t have to.
I heard Rawley before I saw him, the floorboards announcing his weight as he lumbered toward the kitchen. He was shirtless, his chest and arms dappled with faint, angry scars, and he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world worth waking up for.
“Morning,” he rumbled, voice still half in the dream.
I smiled, feeling stupidly shy. “You missed breakfast. I left you some.”
He made a noise of pleasure, then came around the table, wrapped an arm around my waist, and kissed the crown of my head. His other hand landed, gentle and careful, over the small but persistent curve of my belly.
I’d started to show, just a little. Not enough for strangers to notice, but enough that every time he touched me there, it felt like the world paused to acknowledge it.
He poured himself coffee, drank half in a single swallow, then eyed my notebook. “Plans for today?”
“Same as always,” I said. “Keep everyone alive.”
He grinned, then set down the mug and picked up a pencil, spinning it between his fingers. “You wanna walk the property with me later? I want to see how the new fence is holding up.”
I nodded, liking the idea more than I wanted to admit.
He squeezed my hip, then turned to the stove, started frying up whatever breakfast scraps I’d left for him. I watched him, big and unbreakable, and let myself believe—just for a second—that things could be easy, that I’d earned this.
Out the window, the goats squared off for a head-butting match near the garden fence. The chicks flared into a full chorus. And, on the porch, Burke leaned against the rail, hat tipped low, grinning like he’d seen it all before and couldn’t wait for the next round.
I closed the notebook and set it aside. The day was just beginning, and for once, it was enough.
* * * *
The nursery was smaller than I’d imagined, not much more than a glorified closet, but it was the first room in the house I truly wanted to live in.
Rawley had spent the better part of a week turning the space into something soft enough for a baby—a feat I’d once thought impossible for a man whose only approach to “soft” was the inside of a shotgun shell.
He’d cut a doorway between the bedroom and the nursery himself, declining every offer of help from Macon. I’d overheard their argument one night—Macon quietly offering to handle the framing, Rawley insisting, “If I can’t build a door for my own kid, what good am I?”
Macon left it at that, but the next morning I found him sharpening Rawley’s favorite chisel, the apology glinting in the steel.
Now, the new door hung perfectly square, its paint the same cloudy blue as the Montana sky in April. The room beyond was empty, save for the one object that drew every speck of sunlight in the space: the crib.
