Daddy doesn't listen like Clay does.
My five-year-old. Who believed horses had favorite colors and pinky promises were legally binding. Who could negotiate bedtime for thirty minutes but couldn't articulate why she went quiet every time she came home from Dallas. She'd just done it in five words. Named the thing I'd spent six years refusing to name — that I had married a man who looked at his phone while his daughter talked, and I'd told myself that was normal because the alternative was admitting I'd built my entire adult life around someone who didn't see me.
But Maisie could tell. At five.
I slid down the wall. Sat on the floor. Maisie's nightlight leaked purple butterflies under her door — the one she'd picked at the hardware store, the first thing she'd ever chosen for a room that was hers.
I sat there until the ache settled into something I could carry. Then I got up, washed my face, and went to the couch.
That's what mothers did. They sat on hallway floors, and then they got up.
Late. Couch. Case files open and blurring. The cottage was dark except for the lamp and the glow of my phone when it buzzed.
Clay.
A photo — Starlight in the paddock, late-afternoon light on her coat, the white star catching the sun. Below it:
Jack says papers are signed. She's officially ours. Tell the naming committee in the morning?
Simple. Not flirtatious. Not pushing. Just including us, the way he kept doing — quietly, specifically, like we were part of something he was building and it hadn't occurred to him that we might not be.
My thumbs hovered.
That's incredibly kind, Clay. She's going to be so —Delete. Too warm.
I don't know how to thank you for —Delete. Too much.
You don't have to include us. We're not yours to —Delete. Too honest by a factor of ten.
Finally:She'll lose her mind. Thank you.
His reply came in under ten seconds. A single cowboy hat emoji.
I smiled.
Not the polite smile. A real one. Small and stupid and aimed at a phone screen in a dark living room.
I put the phone face-down on the couch cushion.
Don't do this, Callie.
But the smile wouldn't leave. It sat on my face like a squatter with a lease, and no amount of internal litigation could evict it.
A cowboy hat emoji. That's what undid me.
I was in so much trouble.
Chapter 7
Clay
I'd spent three days figuring out how to ask a woman on a trail ride without it sounding like a date.
I tried casual. TextedMaisie mentioned wanting to see the ridge trail — you both free Saturday?Then deleted it because including Maisie was cheating and I knew it. I tried direct. TypedI want to take you riding. Just you.Then stared at it for ten minutes and deleted that too because it sounded like a proposition and not the kind involving horses.
In the end, it was Momma who solved it.
"Take her up to the overlook," she said Wednesday morning, buttering toast without looking at me. "I'll keep Maisie. We'll bake cookies."
