Page 4 of Wild Sanctuary

He reached across the table to rest his hand on mine as he said he’d make sure his dad kept talking me up like he has for the last nine months before calmly returning to his risotto.

He’s the marketing director at a tech startup in Denver, owner of a sleek loft, curated capsule wardrobe, and firm opinions about the “optics” of everything I do. After years of freelance checks and apartments with questionable plumbing, being with Felix had felt like arriving somewhere I was supposed to be.

The problem is I never quite felt at home once I got there.

Now, it’s been two weeks and he’s still calling me babe. But going scorched earth on Felix is a luxury I can’t afford until I’ve got the staff contract, so babe is a tax I’ll have to keep paying for a while longer.

I quickly type a reply.

ME

Made it safe. Thanks. And Felix, don’t call me babe. Friends, remember?

He responds immediately.

FELIX

K. Don’t get trampled by a cow or whatever. Love you.

Love you.

He says it like a man who still hasn’t heard me and isn’t planning on starting.

Ah, good old selective hearing.

I heave an internal sigh, then I click the message I ignored in the car.

MOM

Called that lawyer you asked me to. Nothing we can do about the land sale. Sorry, baby. Maybe it’s time to let it go?

I close my eyes and let the phone drop to the bed.

Larkspur River ranch. Three hundred acres my great-grandfather homesteaded when this valley was nothing but wilderness. My father left it behind when he followed my mother to Colorado, back when love felt worth uprooting your whole life for. When she left him, he came back to Montana, back to Bill Hartley and the only work he’d ever really known, and he held on to those three hundred acres like a promise he intended to keep. It needed more money than a foreman’s salary could stretch to cover, but that was fine. It was our someday project, father and daughter, building something together.

But someday never came.

The debts surfaced right after he died, when I was twenty-three years old and too broken to ask the right questions. My mother flew in from Arizona, hired a lawyer I’d never met and they sat me down at that kitchen table with neat stacks of papers stamped with urgent red notices. Property taxes, equipment loans, and a mountain of outstanding bills I’d never heard of.

“Your father was stretched thin.” The lawyer’s voice was sympathetic. “He kept this from you to protect you.”

My mother nodded along, her face carefully neutral even as her eyes shifted to her wristwatch, counting the minutes until she could escape back to Arizona. “We need to deal with this now, Daisy. Before it gets worse.”

I was so tired. So broken. I signed where they told me to sign.

I didn’t read the fine print. I didn’t get a second opinion. I didn’t question why the auction happened so fast. Or why there was only one serious bidder.

Or why the lawyer’s phone number went to a disconnected line three months later.

I trusted them. And they sold my father’s legacy for scraps.

The Blackwoods bought it. Every damn acre. For less than half what it was worth.

Silas Blackwood stood in the front row at that auction, silver-haired and expensive-booted, head of the family that’s been buying up this valley for the better part of thirty years. He bought my birthright for the price of a mediocre house in Denver. He didn’t even have the decency to look smug about it, just nodded once, like the outcome was never in question.

Because it wasn’t. I understand that now. The whole thing was orchestrated, the debts and the rushed timeline and the lawyer who vanished. They played me like I was a child.

And my mother? She didn’t orchestrate it, but she didn’t fight it either. She had a life in Colorado and no particular attachment to a piece of land she’d never wanted him to keep in the first place.