Dani mounted beside me, posture careful but determined. Her jaw was set as if she’d rather fall off than admit she was nervous.
“You good?” I asked.
“I’m fine.”
A beat later, her shaky voice cut through the noise of the leaves in the trees, “I might not be fine.”
I laughed, the sound surprising us both.
“Just breathe. Let the horse do most of the work.”
With her focused on the horse slowly trotting beneath her, I allowed myself to take her in as the wind moved through herblonde hair, and dust clung to the edge of her jeans. She looked out of place and perfectly placed at the same time.
She glanced at me over her sunglasses. “You’re smiling.”
“I don’t smile.”
“Well, you are now.”
Damn it.
If only she knew, it had nothing to do with the horses and everything to do withher.
We rode slowly along the fence line.
When my hand slid along the horse’s neck, its solid muscle and heat solid under my palm, something inside me went still.
The reins felt right in my grip.
The saddle leather creaked when I mounted.
My knees locked in on instinct.
For a while, a charged closeness pulsed between us, suspended in the hush of hoof beats. The space stretched, gentle and weightless.
“I always wanted to bring Harper somewhere like this,” I admitted. “Let her see where I came from.”
“Well, now you have,” she said simply before turning her focus back to staying upright on the horse.
At one point, her horse drifted closer to mine, causing our knees to brush. But she didn’t pull away right away, and neither did I. Nor did we look at each other, but the awareness was there; heat through denim, sun on skin, wind lifted her hair at the nape of her neck.
I wanted to touch it, touch her.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I focused on Harper’s unfiltered laughter as it was carried across the pasture, peeling out off-key, the same tuneless song she’d belted in the back seat earlier, bright and wild.
And in that moment, I didn’t feel like I was standing between her and the world alone. I felt like someone was standing withme. And I didn’t know what to do with that, because I hadn’t asked for that, hadn’t planned for that.
And yet here Dani was, buying matching cowgirl hats for her and Harper, planning trips two hours away without asking permission, and bringing my daughter into a piece of my history I’d kept shut.
Not trying to fix it, just standing inside it.
I’d spent years thinking joy was betrayal. Believing that if I let myself feel it, I’d be turning my back on Elena. But watching my daughter laugh under an open sky, I realized grief doesn’t leave when joy walks in.
It just moves over.
When we walked back towards Dani’s car a few hours later, Harper skipped ahead, dirt-smudged and glowing, and Dani fell into step beside me. She was close enough that I could practically feel the heat of her arm through the thin space between us.
