Page 69 of Wild Sanctuary

Leave him be.

COLT

And where’s the fun in that, Weston?

WEST

He did what he thought was right. That’s all.

COLT

That is a very generous interpretation of two thousand dollars, brother.

WEST

Where’s June?

COLT

… Good question.

MAGGIE

Haven’t seen her today.

COLT

Wyatt. Brother. Light of my life. What in the hell is going on with Daisy Monroe?

They’ve been at it for the better part of two hours. I scroll to the bottom and notice that June hasn’t sent a single message. The whole thread, not one contribution, and the silence where her voice should be tells me more than any of their messages do. She’s furious, is what that silence means. She called and I shut her down. Now she’s sitting in that kitchen reading every one of these and saying nothing, which is the June Hartley equivalent of a controlled detonation.

I type.

ME

She’s Tom’s daughter. I was looking out for her. Drop it.

Then I mute the chat for forty-eight hours, put my phone away and go back to the fence line, because I have sixteen posts to reset and three days of work ahead of me and not a single spare minute for this particular conversation.

Rhett is at the next post when I get back, tamping gravel at the base to pack it solid. He glances up once when I crouch alongside him and hands me the tamping bar without being asked. He doesn’t ask what the chat said. Just moves to the next post, without making it a thing.

And that’s exactly why he’s my best friend.

We work until the light goes long and orange across the upper pasture, and my hands are good and sore, and my shoulders are finally done in a way that has nothing to do with anything except fence posts and hard work. When we finally sit on the tailgate with the cold dregs of the thermos between us and the stars beginning to come through thick and close above the ridge, the silence between us is the easy kind. The kind that doesn’t need filling.

Rhett stares out across the darkening valley for a long moment before he murmurs, “Some things you can’t fence out.”

I know he’s not talking about the property line.

Inhaling slowly, I turn the thermos cap in my hands. The creek has quieted some with the drop in temperature, and the ridge is dark against a sky that’s shifted from orange to deep blue on its way toward something closer to black.

South of here, past the lower pasture, the ranch house will have its kitchen light on. And in the cabin beside it is Tom Monroe’s daughter—the woman who walked back into my life a week ago and hasn’t stopped making everything harder and better and goddamn impossible in equal measure.

But I don’t say any of that to Rhett. I just sit with it.

And in the quiet, the question I’ve been driving fence posts through all day finally catches up with me.

What if I read it all wrong?