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“It wasn’t your fault.” She drew a yellow flower in the mare’s grass. “Boone kept making him eat.”

“Good.”

“And Wyatt found reasons to come by the bunkhouse.”

I looked toward the door. “He did?”

“He checked the creek gauge twice in one day.”

“The creek gauge is not at the bunkhouse.”

“I know.”

I put the pen down.

The Calloway family expressed love through logistics. Wyatt most of all. He could disguise concern as an inspection, affection as a budget revision, grief as a mortgage column. He had come to check on his brother and called it water.

“They don’t know how to ask,” I said.

“Neither do we.”

The answer was so precise it took me apart a little.

I looked at Josie.

She looked back. Hazel eyes, freckles across her nose, one loose strand falling out of her braid. She was not asking me to explain Denver. She was not offering a confession of her own. She was placing a shared fact on the floor between us beside the pens.

Neither do we.

“Maybe we’re learning,” I said.

Her smile was small and real. “Maybe.”

A shadow crossed the doorway.

Cash stood there holding two glasses of lemonade. Boone filled the space behind him, one shoulder nearly touching each side of the frame.

They had dirt on their jeans and hay dust on their shirts. Cash’s hair was windblown. Boone’s forearms were streaked with grease from something mechanical.

Neither man crossed the threshold.

That mattered.

Cash’s eyes moved over the room. The paper. The pens. The scraps around the table. Butterbean wearing his crown. Me sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pink marker uncapped in one hand and a flower sticker attached to my wrist.

His face softened.

Josie beamed at him. “I love your playroom!”

“It’s not a—” I began.

The denial came automatically.

Not a playroom. A multipurpose room. A creative space. An office-adjacent relaxation environment with low furniture and washable supplies.

A playroom was an admission.

A playroom said we had built a place specifically for this. A place where I could sit on the floor and color badly and laugh loudly and let a message wait. A place where nothing I produced had to be useful. A room for the part of me that had gone without a room for thirty years.