The question sat between us in the lamplight — simple and enormous and exactly the thing I'd been carrying in my chest for weeks without letting myself look at it.
I chose my words the way I chose steps in a minefield. Careful. Honest. Protecting everyone.
"Clay loves you very much, baby. He's very special to us."
Brow furrowed, lips pursed, horse squeezed tighter. "Okay," she said. "But I think he should be my daddy." She rolled onto her side. "He's better at it than Daddy is."
Then she closed her eyes.
I sat on the edge of her bed for a long time. One hand on her back, feeling her ribs expand and contract, the steady rhythm of a child falling asleep.
Preston had a daughter. Clay had Maisie.
Late. Maisie asleep. The cottage quiet.
Clay was on the couch with his reading glasses on — the ones he refused to acknowledge existed — scrolling through breeding stock reports. He tipped the screen toward me. A horse. Chestnut, white blaze, standing in a paddock somewhere in Oklahoma.
"Jack thinks she's the one for the spring sale. Look at her conformation."
"I have no idea what I'm looking at."
"See how her legs are set? Straight under her. No toe-in, no base-narrow. And that hip —" He drew a line on the screen with his finger. "That's a reining hip. That's an engine."
"An engine."
"Where the power comes from. The hindquarters. That's what makes a horse stop hard and turn fast."
I looked at the horse on his screen and then at his face — lit up, animated, glasses slipping down his nose. His hands moved when he talked about horses. Broad, animated gestures, drawing shapes in the air. He talked about the program the way I'd heard Savannah talk about cases that mattered — with the focused intensity of someone who'd found the thing their brain was built to do.
"She looks like an engine," I said.
He kissed the top of my head. "You're humoring me."
"I'm learning."
His phone screen dimmed. He dropped his chin to the top of my head and exhaled — one long breath, the kind that meant the day was done and you were exactly where you wanted to be.
I thought about the woman who'd driven into Copper Creek with three boxes and two suitcases and a garbage bag of toys. That woman checked the locks twice every night. That woman slept with her shoes by the bed.
This woman hadn't checked the locks in weeks. Her phone was somewhere on the nightstand, probably dead. Her shoes were wherever she'd kicked them off.
She'd built something. Without meaning to, without permission from the part of her brain that still ran threat assessments on every good thing that walked through her door. A life with boots by the front door and a toothbrush in the holder and a man who added more cheese and a daughter who wanted him to stay.
Don't think about what could take this away.
Clay's arm tightened around me. I fell asleep against his chest to the sound of his heartbeat and the deep silence of a house that feels safe.
My phone buzzed — not dead after all.
The screen lit up in the dark. A text from a Dallas area code.
We need to discuss Maisie's living arrangements. I'll be in Copper Creek this week. — P
The screen dimmed. The room went dark again.
I didn’t sleep.
Chapter 16
