Page 14 of The Rancher’s One and Only

“Not wrong. My curiosity would’ve gotten the better of me. That’s one of my more regrettable and useful features. I’m curious. About everything. It’s what’s got me as far as I’ve gotten.”

“I read your bio.”

She looked at him, and he didn’t take his eyes off the road, but he could feel her stare. “You did?”

“I had to make sure that you weren’t a grifter.”

She laughed. “I would be terrible at grifting. I’ve been told that I’m toxically honest.”

“What does that mean exactly? How can a person be too honest?”

She sounded very grave then. “Oh, they can be. Trust me. And it’s taken me a very long time to figure out that when people say they want you to be honest, they don’t mean it. Because what they actually want is to hear their own opinion said back to them with some level of earnestness, but honesty is not actually ever what they’re looking for. And there absolutely is such a thing as being too honest, when you don’t cover it in social niceties so that it’s easier for someone to digest, then they find it abrasive. Even if you are just trying to help. I’ve always had that problem. Well, it’s not helped by the fact that I’m generally the youngest person in the room.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-eight. But almost everyone in the position I’m in in this field is closer to forty. Maybe thirty-five. Haley is around thirty-five, which is one reason I find her behavior alarming. It feels very high school to me. In theory. I didn’t actually attend high school in a traditional sense.”

“You went to college early.”

“Yes. That is in my bio. I ended up going when I was fifteen, I got through the first program really quickly, and accelerated my way through my PhD. My biggest problems have been interpersonal. It’s never… Fossils are great. They tell a story. And they do it with objectivity. Human beings aren’t like that. Plus, you can offend them. I’ve yet to offend any skeletons.”

“Well, I feel that if you’re offensive then people need to toughen up a little bit.”

“I would agree with that. But a lot of people lack resilience. If you want to hone resilience, try going to college when you’re fifteen.”

He laughed. “Foster care will do it too.”

“You were in foster care?” And right then, he felt that curiosity. The intensity of it. Felt it zero in right on him. She was like a laser.

“Yeah,” he said. “For a lot of my life. I was in a group home later on. Because I caused quite a bit of trouble, that’s where I met Dakota and Rowdy.”

“Ah. I see. That’s why the ranch is called Three Brothers.”

“Yeah. It is. And you thought that we were trouble.”

“Well,” she said. “It’s only that I guess I assumed the name might be preexisting.”

“A fair enough assumption,” he said.

“I thought so.”

“This was always our plan. To start a ranch up here. Well, not here specifically. Rowdy led that. But it was a dream we had when we were younger. Home. A place for all of us.”

“That’s really wonderful. I love that you managed to do that. I find that so many people have dreams, but they don’t have any follow-through.”

“That is true. Sometimes it’s sad. But sometimes people don’t have the resources. When I tell you, getting the resources together has been the hardest part. Though all of us have been very successful in our own fields. We’ve also dumped absolutely everything we have into this place.”

“Well, it works for me, because it gave you an incentive to take some of my grant money.”

Her directness on that was funny. He could see how people might not always be able to deal with her brand of honesty. He liked it, though. It was interesting. Truth be told, he wasn’t a big fan of fake social niceties either. Mainly because he’d spent his whole life surrounded by people who often seemed nice, but didn’t have good intentions. He would rather deal with somebody who spoke plainly.

“I suppose it did.”

“What made you decide to make it a guest ranch?”

“Well. None of us is from a ranching background. Rowdy a little bit. Though he only remembers bits and pieces of it.”

“Why did Rowdy end up in foster care?”