My hands stalled on the pajamas I was folding.
"Baby —"
"Why can't I stay here? We could go see the horses."
I pressed the pajamas flat. Picked up the toothbrush. Kept moving because stopping would mean feeling this, and feeling this while she was watching would break the one rule I'd made myself in the divorce: never let Maisie see me fall apart.
"Daddy loves you," I said. "You'll have a good time. And I'll be right here when you get back. Always."
She looked at me. Five years old and she already knew that "Daddy loves you" was the thing adults said when they didn't have a better answer. She picked up her stuffed horse and hugged it tight and walked to her room without another word.
I finished packing the bag. Zipped it. Set it by the front door.
Then I went to the bathroom, closed the door, sat on the cold tile floor, and pressed my palms against my eyes.
“Fuck.”
I hated this.
She didn't want to go. She'd said it plainly, without dramatics, without negotiation — just the quiet truth of a child who'd learned that the world would do what it wanted regardless of her feelings.
And I was going to hand her over anyway. Because the court said so. Because the agreement said so. Because freedom from Preston Ashford came with terms and conditions, and the biggest one was this: forty-eight hours, every second weekend, no exceptions.
The price of freedom.
It cost more than anything he ever took from me.
I sat on the bathroom floor until my eyes were dry and my hands were steady. Then I washed my face, checked on Maisie — asleep, horse clutched to her chest, boots still on — and went to the living room and sat in the dark.
The bag by the door.
The quiet house.
The Friday before a Dallas weekend, and I was alone on a couch with a cup of tea I couldn't taste, bracing for a Sunday return that would bring my daughter home quiet and wrong and needing to be pieced back together.
This was my life.
I was building something good. I knew that. The office, the town, Maisie's laughter in a paddock — I was building something real.
But every second Friday, the bill came due.
Chapter 5
Clay
The spark kept catching.
Nights at the house, after everyone had gone to bed, I found myself at the kitchen table with my laptop open — not watching highlights or checking circuit standings, which had been my nighttime ritual for years. I was studying bloodlines. Quarter horse registries. Performance pedigrees. I pulled up AQHA records and cross-referenced dams and sires, looking for the genetic intersections where cutting instinct met athleticism met temperament. I fell down a rabbit hole about the King Ranch, the Four Sixes, the legendary programs that had turned horse breeding into legacy.
During the day, I couldn't shut up.
I'd be at the paddock fence with Jack, pointing at yearlings, talking too fast, seeing things I didn't know I could see until I started looking. The bay colt who moved like a reiner. Penny's filly with cow sense coming from her dam's side. I'd catch myself mid-sentence — three minutes deep in a monologue about broodmare bands — and Jack would be standing therewith his arms folded, nodding, a look on his face like he was watching something click into place and had the good sense not to interrupt it.
It felt like hunger. That's the closest I could get. The same single-minded need that had driven me into chutes for twelve years — the need to be good at something, to build something, to prove I was more than just a body on the back of a bull — had found a new direction and was running flat out. I'd lie in bed at night and see paddock configurations instead of arena layouts. I'd wake up thinking about bloodlines instead of draw sheets.
But then the doubt crept in.
Is this real? Or am I just grasping at the first thing that isn't bull riding?
