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“They wrote it all down.” He’d read it enough times to recite it from memory. “Requires ready access to hydration and cooling and the ability to discontinue activity during prolonged strenuous exertion in high ambient heat under load.”

Jodie was quiet for a second. “The ability to discontinue activity.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what ended it? Not the heat. The stopping.”

“That’s what ended it.” Mac heard his own voice crack and hated it. “I could still ruck. Still shoot, still fight, still run a crew. Didn’t matter. There’s a rule—universality of service. You have to be employable and deployable wherever the Forces need you. My limitation didn’t fit. Even if your actual job doesn’t look like that, the rule doesn’t bend for one guy. I didn’t meet it. Item three-b. On medical grounds. That was 2020.”

He folded his hands in his lap.

“Twelve years, and it ends in an office with a man I’d never met being very decent about it.”

Jodie’s thumb stroked his anklebone.

“You thought stopping meant failing your crew,” she said.

Mac looked up. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady.

“I grew up around horses, remember?” Jodie said. “You can have an animal sweating through the saddle blanket, sides heaving, and he’ll still keep going if you ask him to. He’ll go until he drops. Doesn’t mean he should.”

“I’m not a horse, Ranch Girl.”

“No. You’re worse.” She tilted her head. “You have even more pride than the proudest horse.”

He tried to laugh but it came out half laugh and half sob. He had to put a hand over his eyes.

“God,” he said.

“And ranchers are just as bad,” she went on, quieter now. “Fence is down, cattle are out, storm’s coming. You finish the job because somebody has to. You don’t stop when you’re tired. You stop when the work is done. But it’s never done.”

Mac dropped his hand.

Jodie was looking at him with absolutely no judgment at all.

It’s because she’s built the same damn way.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That was pretty much it. Except, my work was done. They released me.”

Jodie let that sit for a minute.

Then she said, “And a year later you walked into Depot.”

Mac blinked. “How do you⁠—”

“Background check, remember?” She almost smiled. “Dates. I’m good with dates.”

“Right.” He huffed. “Yeah. But I worked the ranch first.”

He could still remember walking into his parents’ kitchen with two duffel bags and nowhere he was required to be the next morning. His mother had cried when she hugged him. His dad had put him straight to work fixing a gate the wind had pulled half off its hinges.

Mac had never been more grateful for a broken gate in his life.

Something that needed doing.

“I helped out on the ranch. Tried to figure out what came next.” He picked at a loose thread on the sleeping bag. “I could’ve stayed as long as I wanted. Dad would’ve found enough work to keep me busy until I was ninety.”

“But you didn’t.”