Page 112 of Wild Sanctuary

“The line’s fixed. Let’s check the trough levels on the way back.”

Colt pushes off the fence and follows. He doesn’t say another word about it, and I spend the next hour checking water troughs and pretending every cell in my body isn’t counting down the minutes until I walk through my own front door.

* * *

It’s past dark by the time I get back. The sun didn’t quit till past nine. Dimly lit porch lights and silence greet me as I step inside the main house.

I pull my boots off at the door and leave them on the mat. The kitchen smells like garlic and rosemary, and there’s a dish wrapped in foil in the oven with a sticky note on top in June’s handwriting.

Saved you some dinner. Don’t you dare eat standing up.

Staying in town at Maggie’s tonight.

You’re welcome.

I stare at the last two words for a beat, then set the plate on the counter and eat standing up. Because I’m thirty-five years old and this is my kitchen.

It’s only when I’ve finished my beef stew that I notice the rest of it.

A notepad sits on the kitchen table, covered in Daisy’s handwriting with a pen tucked into the spiral. There’s a coffee mug in the sink, rinsed but not washed, with a faint smudge of lipstick on the rim that she probably doesn’t know she leaves. Her boots are by the back door, lined up neatly beside the mudroom wall, and when I hang my hat on the hook by the door, hers is already on the one next to it.

Side by side.

Like they belong together.

The domesticity of it lodges in my chest and doesn’t move because this is what it would look like. If she wasn’t just a guest in the house, or Tom Monroe’s daughter passing through.

This is what it would look like if she lived here. Her coffee mug next to mine every morning. Her handwriting on my kitchen table. Her things mixed in with my things until I couldn’t tell where mine ended and hers started.

When do you get to be the one who wants somethin’?

I put my plate in the sink next to her mug and wash them both. Then I dry my hands on the towel and flick off the kitchen light.

The house is in complete darkness as I slowly take the stairs. Not because I’m tired, though I am. But because I know what’s waiting at the top, and I’ve spent six years believing I could never have it.

The only shred of light comes from underneath my door and I reach for the doorknob.

On the other side of this door is every reason I should have bunked in the barn tonight, and every reason I didn’t.

I turn the knob.

She’s sitting up against the headboard with her phone in her lap, and the light from the screen catches the amber in her eyes when she looks up. She’s wearing my shirt, the gray flannel one with the snap buttons. The sleeves are rolled past her wrists, and the collar is too wide, so it’s fallen off one side to display her bare shoulder.

She takes me in. The mud on my jeans and how my hair’s pressed flat from the hat I wore all afternoon. I probably smell like copper pipe and the north pasture.

“Hey.” The word lands softly.

“Hey.”

I close the door behind me and lean against it. She watches me from my bed in my shirt with her hair loose around her shoulders, and I don’t move.

“You just going to stand there all night?”

“Thinkin’ about it.”

“How’s the water line?”

“Fixed.”