Block letters. Sharpie. The handwriting of a man trying not to have handwriting.
I've been watching you for a long time, little one. Nationals will be ours.
The cold goes through me clean. From my throat down through my belly into my knees.
I read it twice. Then a third time, because the third time is when my brain catches up to my body and I think:little one. Ours.
My second thought is Buckley.
My third thought is Buckley wouldn't write little one, or ours.
Buckley would write something stupid and signed and confident.
This isn't stupid. This is patient.
This is somebody who got into the tack room.
Somebody who knows about nationals.
Somebody who has been looking at me long enough to think we're a we.
I check my saddle bag. Nothing else moved. Gloves still rolled. Hoof pick where it should be. The Carmex I keep in the side pocket still in its place, lid still on. He didn't take anything. He just put the note where I'd find it and left.
I should be moving. I should be walking the paper to my father. I should be doing any of the things a Lyle does when somebody puts hands on something that belongs to her.
I'mnotmoving.
I'm standing in the tack room with my back against the wall, a piece of notebook paper in my hand, and the realization sliding into me, slow and cold, that I have been watched.
Not glanced at. Not flirted with. Not undressed by a drunk biker at a fire pit who'll forget about it by morning.
Watched.
Long enough to know about nationals.
Long enough to know which saddle bag is mine and where I keep my gloves rolled, and Inevernoticed.
That's the part that makes me sit down.
I sit down on the bench against the wall. Hard. The back of my head hits the pegboard and a halter falls off its hook and lands on my boot.
I don't pick it up. My hands are shaking.
I look at them like they belong to somebody else.
Twenty-five years old, top-fifteen barrel racer in the country, and my hands are doing something I haven't let them do since Mom vanished.
My fingers are trembling around a piece of paper a stranger touched and put inside the bag I sleep next to in motel rooms on the road.
I think about every motel I've stayed in this season.
I think about every parking lot I've walked across alone after a ride.
I think about every gas station I've stopped at between events, every Valero and Phillips 66 and Maverik between Sharp, Stephenville, Amarillo, Lubbock and back, every time I left Jaeger in the trailer for ten minutes to use the bathroom or grab a coffee.
He was there.
Somewhere. At one or all of them. Watching me.
