"Muscle memory. My body apparently kept the riding and deleted the algebra. Questionable priorities."
"Rosie's opinions are mostly about carrots."
"We have that in common."
The trail narrowed as it climbed, switching back through live oaks and juniper. Callie let Rosie pick her way through the rocks without micromanaging. Most people fought the horse on a trail like this. She trusted it. Which told me something about her that had nothing to do with horses.
"This is beautiful," she said. She'd stopped Rosie without realising it, one hand loose on the reins, the other resting on her thigh, her face turned toward the valley like she'd forgotten I was there.
"My dad used to bring me up here when I was a kid. Never said much. Just rode with me and let me sort myself out."
"Sounds like a great dad."
"The best."
"He told me once that the answer to every question I'd ever have was somewhere on this ranch. I was twelve. I thought he meant buried treasure."
She smiled. "Was there?"
"Momma's cookie recipe. Locked in a safe." She laughed — quick and bright, like it surprised her.
We crested the ridge and the overlook opened up — the whole valley, the ranch, the creek winding silver through the pastures, the rooflines catching the afternoon light. I'd seen this view a thousand times, and it still stopped me. Today, with Callie beside me, pulling Rosie to a halt and going still in a way that wasn't caution but wonder, it stopped me differently.
I dismounted. My knee let me know it was there. I ignored it.
"There's a flat spot just ahead. Thought we could eat."
She raised an eyebrow. "Louisa's picnic?"
"I tried to stop her."
“No, you didn't."
I shook my head, grinning. “No, I didn't."
She dismounted with an ease that caught me off guard. I spread the blanket on the flat rock overlooking the valley, set out the basket, and sat down.
Callie sat beside me. Not close. Not far. She tucked one leg underneath her and kept the other stretched out, boot heel digging into the rock — half settled, half ready to stand. She ate a sandwich with one hand and gestured with the other when she talked, which was new. She didn't gesture at the office. She didn't gesture at the ranch with people watching. But up here, with no audience and eight hundred feet of elevation between us and the rest of the world, her hands were telling me things her mouth hadn't gotten to yet.
We talked about safe things first — the breeding program, Starlight's paperwork, Jack's plans for the training facility. She asked smart questions, the kind that told me she'd been listening to more than she let on.
"You really see this as your future?" she asked. "The horses?"
"I think so. Maybe." I pulled at a blade of grass. Tore it in half. Reached for another one. "I've been Clay Blackwood, Bull Rider, my whole adult life. That's all anyone sees. Take away the bull, and I don't know who's left."
The words sat between us. I hadn't said them out loud before. My hands kept tearing grass.
Callie didn't jump in. She set her sandwich down, drew her knees up, and wrapped her arms around them — not closing off, settling in. Like she was making room for whatever came next.
"I applied to law school once," she said.
She was looking at the valley, not at me, her voice stripped of the usual armor.
"UT Austin. I had the LSAT score. I had the personal statement drafted. I had a folder on my laptop — admissionsrequirements, scholarship applications. Color-coded. Because I am not a spontaneous woman." The ghost of a smile, there and gone. "I'd been working on it for a year. Nights after Preston went to bed. My secret project."
She picked at the label on her tea bottle.
"One day, I opened my laptop and the folder was gone. Deleted. Not moved, not archived — deleted. I searched everywhere. I asked Preston if he'd seen it. He looked at me like I'd asked about the weather and said, 'I cleaned up your desktop. It was cluttered.'"
