"Home. My home. The ranch."
I pull back enough to see his face. "The ranch you don't bring anyone to?"
"That's the one."
"The sacred sanctuary where you go to be alone with your horses and your silence and your brooding?"
"I don't brood."
"You brood professionally. It should be listed on your circuit entry form under special skills."
He concedes with a look that says he's storing this for later retaliation. "I brood occasionally. The point is, I want you to see it."
"Why?"
"Because it's mine. And I want you in it."
The simplicity of the statement lands in a place I stopped guarding the moment I said the wordloveto Grant's headstone. Colt doesn't do speeches. He does actions and gestures and the occasional sentence that rewires your entire nervous system.
"Take me," I say.
He takes my hand and walks me back through the cemetery toward the truck, past the rows of headstones warming in the morning sun, and when I glance back one last time, Grant's stone catches the light and holds it.
We head towards the ranch, which sits in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, so far from anything resembling a city that the nearest grocery store requires its own road trip.
The land opens as we climb into the foothills, rolling grassland giving way to rocky terrain dotted with live oak and juniper, the sky vast and unbroken. Hawks circle above a ridgeline, and in the distance, mule deer pick their way along a dry creek bed.
"How much of this is yours?" I ask.
"Everything from that fence line to the ridge." He points east, where barbed wire tracks the curve of a hill. "Mostly grazing land. House is at the end of the road."
The road is a single lane of packed caliche winding through a stand of live oaks before dropping into a shallow valley. The house at the bottom is a low, stone-and-timber structure that looks like it grew out of the landscape.
A porch runs the length of the front. A stock tank sits in the pasture to the south, and Colt pulls the truck to a stop near the fence line. The horses come up to greet him before we're out of the cab, nosing at his hands, bumping his shoulder, the easy familiarity of animals who trust the man who feeds them.
"This is Jury," he says, rubbing the blaze between a sorrel mare's eyes. "And the roan trying to eat your sleeve is Verdict."
"You named your horses Jury and Verdict."
"I also have one named Objection. She's in the back pasture being difficult, which is her default setting."
"You named your horses after legal terms."
"I named them after things I hear a lot." He pulls a piece of peppermint from his pocket and lets Verdict lip it off his palm. "Grant named Objection. Said she reminded him of me."
A beat-up Ford with a hay bale in the bed is parked near the barn, and I nod toward it. "Whose truck?"
"Emmett's. He runs the place when I'm on the road." Colt scratches Jury behind the ear. "Retired bareback rider. Took a bad wreck in Cheyenne years ago, shattered his pelvis, and the circuit was done with him. He needed a place, I needed someone I trusted with the animals. Works out."
"Where is he?"
"Checking fence line on the back acreage, if I know him. He makes himself scarce when I'm home. Says two bulls under one roof is one too many."
The tenderness in his voice as he tells his horses about Grant is different from the controlled grief at the headstone. This is quieter, more lived-in, the kind of missing that settles into daily routines and becomes part of the furniture.
The interior of the house smells like cedar and leather and the sunbaked warmth of stone walls that have absorbed a thousand afternoons. The rooms are spare and masculine throughout, with a kitchen that has open shelving and a butcher block counter, a small room and bath off the kitchen that Colt says is Emmett's, a living room anchored by a stone fireplace and a leather couch that's seen hard use, and a bedroom at the end of a short hallway with windows facing the mountains.
His trophies are here. Championship buckles line the hallway wall, catching the afternoon light, and beside them hang photographs. One stops me. Him and Grant at an event, both grinning, both young, both looking like the world owed them something and they planned to collect. Grant's arm is slung over Colt's shoulder, and they're both covered in arena dust. The easy, unguarded joy on their faces is the kind that only exists between people who haven't learned yet that the world takes things away.
