Page 64 of The Reckless Rookie

By the second feeding Vicente’s moved Bonita, quiet, with the tractor and a tarp and no ceremony, because ceremony is for the living and there’ll be time. The stall’s mucked and fresh. Elsa sleeps in the clean straw between bottles, and Finn and I take turns on the cold floor beside her, and around two he feeds her and around four I do, and in between we sit against the boards a foot apart and don’t talk. The not-talking gets thinner every hour, until it isn’t a wall anymore, just a thing I’m choosing to keep up, and I’m too tired to keep choosing it.

So at four, with the filly full and out again and his shoulder an inch from mine, I stop choosing it.

“I have to tell you something. You’re going to let me get all the way through it before you say a word, because if you stop me I won’t start again.”

He goes still. “Okay.”

And I tell him.

All of it. Sebastian. The review. That the placement was never the target. I was. That Finn was the coin Sebastian found in my pocket, the liability with the headline, and cutting him loose took the coin off the table.

“But that’s not the whole reason I did it.” This is the part I’ve never said to a living soul, the part I couldn’t say to a horse. “I told you it was the ranch. It was the ranch. But you were a target too. If you’d stayed, if you’d planted yourself here and fought Sebastian for me the way I knew you’d want to, you’d have handed him exactly what he was fishing for. A violent defendant, on the record, going at the nice man in the suit. He’d have had your freedom and my ranch in one afternoon. So I cut you. Cruel and clean, on purpose, so you’d go fast and not look back and be nowhere near the blast when it came.” My voice isn’t level. I’ve quit trying to make it. “I let you think you were a liability I was managing, because if you’d known you were a target you’d never have left, and your leaving was the only way I had to keep you out of it. I lied to you to protect you. And I’ve hated myself for it every hour since.”

He starts to say something. I put my hand up, because the worst one’s still coming.

“And I love you.” Flat. The way I say the true things. “I’ve loved you since somewhere in the post-holes, and I was too much a coward to say it when it counted, and I cut you without telling you, and I let you drive off into the dark thinking you were nothing but a good worker I’d finished with. You. The man who walked into a killing-scared animal to save Jason. I called you a good worker and watched it land, because a clean cut heals faster, and it was the most cowardly thing I have ever done, and I did it to the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“You didn’t do this,” I tell him, before he can pick it up, because I can see him reaching. “The gala didn’t light it. Sebastian was coming whether you ever laid eyes on him or not. I said cruel things to you at that trough because I was scared and you were handy, and that was wrong too. This is mine. All of it. I don’t want you carrying one ounce of a thing I built with my own two hands.”

He’s quiet a long moment. Long enough that I brace for the version where he’s finally, rightly, furious.

It doesn’t come.

“Are you finished?” Gentle.

“I’m done.”

“Okay.” He turns to face me in the straw, the sleeping filly between us, and keeps his hands to himself so the words have to carry their own weight. “I forgave the transfer somewhere on the road to Boerne, because you were right that it protected the other men, even if the way you did it was cruel. The rest of it, deciding for me.” He shakes his head. “You should have told me. Not because I would have left quietly. Because I had the right to choose the risk with you. That’s what you did wrong, and you already know it, so I’m not going to stand here and teach it to you.”

“Here’s the part you keep not hearing, that everybody keeps trying to tell you, the horse included.” A crooked almost-smile, the first one, and God I’ve missed it. “You don’t have to carry it alone. You say that like it’s a fact about the world. It’s not. It’s just the fanciest wall you ever built. Your dad’s got it. Vicente’s been hollering about it for twenty years in Vicente-language, which is one word a year. You’re allowed to hand somebody half.” He reaches then, finally, takes my hand off my own knee and holds it. “I spent my whole life owning nothing so nobody could take anything, and it turns out that’s being scared with good cardio. Hand me half. I’m strong. It’s the one thing I’m good for.”

And I let him take it.

Not the confessing. The letting. I put a piece of the weight into his scarred hand and let him hold it, and I don’t stop being myself.

I stop being alone in it.

“I can’t promise what happens to the contract,” I say. “I can’t promise the county gives you back to this ranch tomorrow, or that any house or plan survives what comes next.”

He stays quiet, letting me finish.

“I’m asking you to choose me when your six months are done. Stay because you want this life with me, not because I found a property and made the decision look practical.”

His face changes slowly, hope arriving where he doesn’t trust it yet.

“You are asking me to stay.”

“I’m asking you to help me figure out what staying looks like.”

A crooked smile touches his mouth. “I may have already pictured a place down the road.”

“You can show me after you finish the program.”

Vicente finds us like that at the gray edge of dawn, and he takes one look, and something moves in his face that on any other man would be a grin.

Vicente checks the clock, then the sleeping filly. “I have the next feeding. Both of you go sleep.”

We go up to the house in the first light, and I don’t take his hand on the walk. I take his whole arm, both of mine around it, leaning into him the way I’ve never let myself lean on anything, and he shortens his stride to mine without being asked.