Chapter Seven
“This is fun!” Larissa said as they walked their horses down the street, their flags streaming out behind them, waving to the crowd and occasionally throwing candy they had in their saddlebags.
“I always love parades,” Summer said to Larissa, grateful that the little girl had been allowed to go. Her dad seemed kind of taciturn and stern. Losing his wife had probably taken a lot of the joy out of his life, and now he had three children he was trying to raise on his own. She supposed that would make anyone serious.
A band played ahead of them, and there were several fire trucks behind them, lights flashing, but no sirens. The crowd cheered occasionally for the twirlers who were right in front of them. One of them had lost her baton, and it ended up plinking down in front of Cricket, the horse Larissa rode.
Cricket didn’t bat an eye. She was battle worn and tested and had been in more than her fair share of parades. No horse was bombproof, although Cricket was as close as they came. Summer would have been really upset if she had taken off down the street with Larissa on her back. There were times over the years whereshe’d had horses who had done exactly that to her. It was hard to get a horse used to crowds and noise without getting taken for a ride a time or two.
She wouldn’t have trusted Larissa on Cricket if she hadn’t been sure of her. Bunny was a little bit more skittish, but she was staying calm and doing fairly well.
Taking the horses in the parade was good for them, because it taught them to chill when it came to all the commotion around them.
She had gotten Gilbert’s offer on the house when she’d run in to change her clothes after loading the horses on her trailer.
She hadn’t responded to it, and she figured she could take a couple of hours to stew over it.
He’d offered her more than what she was asking.
Her realtor had been thrilled, and he’d counseled her to take it immediately.
The offer was good for forty-eight hours, but Summer figured she wouldn’t make him wait that long. The thing was, he wanted to close in thirty days, and she would have to sell her horses, clean out her stuff, and find a place to live in less than a month. She wasn’t sure she could do it. She hadn’t been expecting the place to sell that fast, or maybe she just hadn’t wanted it to.
“Hey, there’s my dad and my brothers!” Larissa called, pointing over to a tall man standing with two young boys on either side of him. Lucas had grown since he first started coming to therapy, and he’d also gotten quieter. After his mother died, he barely said anything. It was currently her responsibility to try to help him work through his grieving. She thought they’d been doing rather well. He never would be the carefree boy he had been, but part of that was him growing up, and it wasn’t just him losing his mother.
Robert, on the other hand, was back to being a typical nine-year-old. He grinned and waved and jumped when they threw extra candy in his direction.
Summer smiled, watching Robert jump all around for the candy,and Lucas, as mature as he tried to be, even scrambled for a few pieces of chocolate.
She looked away from the boys, and her eyes caught on Gilbert’s. He was staring at her.
She smiled and waved, and tried not to let any of the turmoil in her heart show. This man would be living in her house. The house that her ancestors had grown up in, the house she had grown up in, the house that she had lived in her whole life. He would be making the decisions about it. Sitting in her kitchen, using her library, stabling his horses in her barn. Possibly getting married and bringing another wife home.
She looked away, telling herself that the kids she loved would be staying there as well. Robert and Lucas would grow up in her house, along with Larissa, who she loved and felt more affection toward than she did for any of her other students. It wasn’t even close.
“They wanted to ride, but I told them they couldn’t because they hadn’t practiced.”
“They’re good enough riders that they probably could have, if I would have had enough horses.” She felt the pang of losing Princess. It had been a huge blow to her business. Not just financially, but emotionally as well. Princess had been her go-to horse. Beautiful, regal, and super sweet. A baby could ride her and look good while she was doing it.
But Princess was gone, and she needed to move on. She couldn’t keep regretting the fact that she had been lost. Although, she’d been over and over it already. Could she have done something different? She had been feeding everyone the same grass in the pasture. All the horses were out there. But for some reason, Princess was the only one who colicked.
Colic wasn’t extremely well understood, and there were different kinds, but the basic gist of it was a horse couldn’t burp, and if they had their feed changed too abruptly, or if they ate bad or moldy feed, or…some other things happened, it could send them into stomach cramps and intestinal agony that, without an operation, could kill a horse. Even with an operation, the horse could die, as Summer had found out. She already knew it; it just never happened to her before.
It seemed the parade was over in record time, and Miss Marjorie, Larissa’s grandmother, was there to get her at the end of the parade route. Gilbert probably didn’t know how lucky he was to have a mother like Miss Marjorie. He also had awesome sisters, and his children had been well taken care of while he had been off saving his business. Summer didn’t know what she would have done if she had children. She had no parents to depend on and no siblings either. She felt like she was alone in the world, although she knew she had good friends.
She supposed she was going to have to talk to Sunny and see if Sunny would allow her to move in with her until she could figure out what she was going to do.
She walked both horses back to the trailer, took their tack off and put it in the appropriate compartments, watched as Larissa skipped off with her grandmother, then loaded both horses before driving home. She could have stayed and walked around the festival, but she wasn’t feeling very festive. In fact, she was feeling downright morose. Totally normal for someone who was losing their home. Actually, she wasn’tlosingit. She was getting paid for it. It was going to be enough for her to pay everything off and have a little bit of money left over, and she needed to be happy about that.
As soon as she got home, she sat down at the bar in her beautiful, amazing kitchen, in the house she loved, and opened her laptop. Reading over the contract one last time, she took a deep breath, clicked the buttons to say that she agreed and to put her signature on the paper, and then hit send.
There. It was done. In thirty days, the farm would no longer be hers.
Chapter Eight
“Are you guys ready?” Gilbert asked as his kids hurried with their last-minute preparations.
“I’m ready,” Larissa said, the overachiever of the group.
