Page 63 of The Reckless Rookie

I don’t move. Couldn’t if I wanted to. There’s a sleeping filly across my boots and I’m not going anywhere, and it settles over me slow that I’m not going anywhere for a while. She’s got no mother. Somebody has to be the still warm thing she leans on, every couple hours, around the clock, until she’s strong enough to stand the world alone. That somebody’s me. I feel it come down over me like a coat. This wild thing’s got nobody, and neither, if I’m honest, do I, and that makes two of us who found the one we get.

I came here to say goodbye to the mare.

The whole drive, foot flat toward the worst thing, I thought I was coming to lose the one creature that ever read me straight, and find out one more time who I am at the bottom of a loss.

That’s not what happened.

I lost her. I’ll grieve her the rest of my life. But that’s not where I find out who I am tonight. I don’t find it in the thing that died.

I find it in the thing asleep on my boots.

Because a wild animal’s daughter looked at everything I am, the whole beast of me that put a man in the hospital and lost a game a couple hours ago and can’t seem to stop losing what it loves, and she saw straight past all of it to the one thing underneath that I spent months learning I had. Still hands. A calm I earned. Something worth sleeping on. She’s alive because the people who loved her mother wouldn’t lose her too, and she chose me because I was safe, and there’s a version of me sitting in this straw, a new one, a whole man I didn’t know I’d finished building, with the proof of him breathing across his feet.

I didn’t watch the old me die tonight.

I held the new one while it fell asleep.

Catt lowers herself into the straw across from me, careful of the filly, and she sits close, close enough that her knee comes to rest against mine and stays there, and that’s the thing I notice out of the whole ruined night, the small warm press of her knee on mine and neither of us moving it. There’s water on her face she isn’t managing. Not hiding it, not fixing it, letting it run, and it’s the most undefended I have ever seen her.

“She chose you,” Catt says. Wrecked.

“Yeah, well.” My voice is shot. “Runs in the family. Her mother had terrible taste too.”

That gets a thing out of her that’s half a laugh and half a sob, the first crack in the level face since I came through the door, and she reaches over and lays a hand on the sleeping filly’s neck, and I lay mine beside it, and her knee stays against mine, and for a minute the three of us breathe.

“She needs a name,” she says.

“She needs a lot of things. Name’s the easy one.”

We look at her a while. Dark and new and out cold, wild already and asleep anyway, a thing that lost everything in her first hour and got to keep her life.

“Elsa,” Catt says, like it was already hers, like she’d been holding it in reserve. “Her name’s Elsa.”

“Elsa.” I try it. It fits, the way Colt’s hat fit, the way this whole ranch fit before I knew I was allowed. “Hey, Elsa. Welcome to the world.”

We sit there, the two of us, on the floor of a barn at midnight, a dead mare behind us and a live foal between us and everything broken between us, her knee against mine and not moving. We don’t touch the wreckage. Not tonight. Tonight there’s a thing asleep across my boots that’s going to need me at two and at four and at six, and a woman an inch away who broke her one rule to tell me a horse was dying, because she thought I’d want to be here.

She reached for me. Out of everyone. After everything she did to shove me gone.

I don’t know what it means yet. I’ve learned not to spend a thing before I’ve counted it. But her knee’s against mine and she’s not moving it, and I’m not moving it, and for the first time since that stop sign on a county road, I’m not driving away from anything.

I lost the game tonight. I lost the mare.

And I’m sitting in the straw with everything I’ve got left in the world inside the reach of one hand, and it’s more than I have ever had.

You can lose it all and win it all on the same night. Different columns. Same ledger.

I keep my hand where it is. I let the filly sleep.

I stay.

Chapter thirty-six

Catalina

We get Elsa through her first night in two-hour pieces, and somewhere around the third feeding the truth finally comes out of me, because I’ve got nothing left to hold it back with.

Exhaustion is the best solvent there is for a wall. I’ve held mine up through worse than tired, through my father’s disappointment and my mother’s campaigns and three years of a man who never learned my name, and it took a dead mare and a live foal and a night with no sleep in it to take the thing down to the studs.