The drive to the farm takes twenty minutes through dark roads and fenced fields. The driver gives me the local version of a tour in a voice soft enough for a hospital night: that pasture floods every spring, that gas station makes decent breakfast tacos, that old barn is not haunted no matter what Ryan’s sisters claim when they want attention.
By the time we reach the house, my nerves have frayed into something soft and dangerous.
The farmhouse sits under a wide black sky, porch light glowing, one upstairs window lit. A woman in a quilted jacket opens the door before the driver kills the engine.
“Mrs. Alvarez,” the driver says. “This is Peyton.”
“Come in before the cold gets ideas,” Mrs. Alvarez says.
Inside smells like lemon cleaner, old wood, and something cinnamon that was baked earlier and abandoned under foil. Children’s boots lie in a heap by the door. A pink backpack slumps against a bench. On the kitchen table, two crayons have rolled into a folded copy of the local paper.
I stand just inside the threshold and feel, with immediate and inconvenient force, how much of Ryan I have never touched.
There are hooks by the door labeled in marker, names written in different hands as the girls grew tall enough to object to old handwriting. A pair of work gloves lies on the bench, cracked at the knuckles and dusted with hay. On the fridge, a school photo of two grinning girls holds down a grocery list, a cardiology appointment card, and a clipping from a Stampede win with Ryan’s face circled in red pen.
Not a shrine.
Worse.
A working house. A family that loves him while the dishwasher runs and somebody argues about homework.
I have spent years writing about public men. The farm makes Ryan private in a way his silence never could.
The driver carries my bag down the hall. Mrs. Alvarez hands me a towel, a spare toothbrush still in plastic, and instructions about the bathroom fan.
A thump comes from upstairs.
Then a whisper.
Then a small voice.
“Is she the hockey lady?”
Mrs. Alvarez looks at the ceiling. “Go to bed, menace.”
“Reporter lady,” I call before I can stop myself.
“Do you know Ryan?”
I look toward the dark kitchen window, where my reflection looks tired, windblown, and much too interested in the answer.
“A little,” I say.
That seems to satisfy the ceiling.
My phone buzzes as I reach the guest room.
Ryan: You there?
I sit on the edge of a bed covered in a blue quilt and type back.
Here. Lily thinks I cover hockey.
Three dots appear, vanish, appear again.
Ryan: She is wrong about most things after 9 p.m.
I smile down at the screen.
