I'd been Clay Blackwood, Bull Rider, for so long that wanting something new felt like betrayal. Like I was replacing one identity with another without stopping to figure out if the new one fit or if I was just afraid of the empty space between them.
I closed the laptop. I'd sit with it.
But even as I told myself to slow down, my brain was already sorting yearlings by potential in my sleep.
Dad and I rode the north fence line on Thursday morning.
This was a thing we'd done since I could sit a horse — father and son, checking fence, saying little. The rhythm of it hadn't changed in twenty years. Two horses walking side by side, the creak of leather, the morning air carrying cedar and grass, and the distant lowing of cattle. It was the closest thing to church I'd ever known.
We fixed a section of wire that had come loose near the creek crossing. Worked together without speaking — him holding the tension, me driving the staples. Our hands knew this language even when our mouths didn't.
When we mounted back up, Dad told a story.
"First two years after your grandfather died nearly broke me," he said, eyes on the horizon, voice unhurried. "Not the work — I knew how to work. But the ranch was his, run his way, and his way had been fueled by whiskey and meanness. I had to tear out everything he'd built in my head before I could build anything real with my hands."
He adjusted his reins. The leather creaked.
"I didn't have much. Had the land, had a handful of cattle, had more stubbornness than sense. But I had a picture in my mind of what this place could be if somebody loved it right. So I just worked it. Day by day. Fence by fence."
His voice shifted then — went warmer the way it always did when he got to this part.
"Then your momma came home. Finished her accounting degree, smart as hell, could've gone anywhere. But she came back." The corner of his mouth lifted — the expression he wore whenever he talked about Momma, like she was still the best surprise of his life thirty-five years in. "She looked at this half-broke ranch and she looked at me and she said, 'I believe in what you're building, Owen Blackwood.' And she meant it. That woman loved me like it was a decision she made every morning and never once wavered on."
He was quiet for a beat.
"When the oil company came along with their offer, that changed everything. Finally had some real money to work with. But the money didn't build this ranch — it just gave us room to breathe. Your momma and I built it. Day by day. Together. Because we had a vision for this family and we never let go of it."
He looked at me then. Brief, direct. Then he reached across the space between our horses and squeezed the back of my neck — the same gesture, the same warm hand, the same shorthand he'd been using since I was a kid.
"The next thing doesn't have to look like the last thing, son."
He turned his horse toward the south section, and I followed. We rode for another hour without saying a word. But something had loosened — the same knot that had been tightening since Fort Worth, since the buckle, since the question I couldn't stop asking. Dad hadn't answered it. He'd done something better. He'd told me I was allowed to find my own answer.
I'd also been finding reasons to go into town.
Feed at Cooper's General — a trip that should've taken twenty minutes, stretched to an hour because I stopped at the hardware store for bolts I didn't need, then walked the length of Main Street like a man with nowhere to be. Which I was. The only place I wanted to be was wherever Callie Monroe happened to be, and on a Saturday morning in Copper Creek, that could be anywhere.
I wasn't expecting to see her through the office window.
Tate & Hollis was closed Saturdays — lights off, blinds down, the CLOSED sign hanging crooked in the door the way it always did. Except one light was on. The back office. And through the gap in the blinds, I could see her — hair tucked behind one ear, reading glasses on, bent over paperwork at her desk like it was a Tuesday morning and not a weekend. Alone. No Bev. No Theo. Just Callie in an empty office with a mug of tea and whatever she was using to fill the hours while her daughter was somewhere else.
I stood on the sidewalk for a long moment. The smart move was to keep walking. She was working. She hadn't invited me. She didn't need a cowboy knocking on the door of her closed office because he'd happened to glance through a window.
I knocked on the door.
She looked up. The reading glasses caught the light. Her expression shifted — surprise, then something careful sliding into place over whatever had been there a second before.
She came to the door. Unlocked it. Opened it halfway.
"Clay." Not unfriendly. But guarded in a way she hadn't been at the riding lesson. "The office is closed."
"I can see that." I nodded at the dark sign. "You always work in closed offices by yourself on Saturdays?"
Something flickered across her face — the briefest slip in the composure before she sealed it. "I had paperwork to catch up on."
"On a Saturday."
"Paperwork doesn't know what day it is."
