"That's what I needed to hear." A pause. "She's the strongest woman I know, Clay. But strong women are the best at destroying the things they love when they're scared. Don't let her."
She hung up. I stood at the fence for a long time with my phone in my hand and the yearlings moving in circles in front of me.
Third Party Contact.She had a column. She was tracking me the way the filing told her to — as a variable, a risk factor, a line item in a legal strategy designed to reduce everything we'd built to a liability.
Sunday dinner.
I set three extra places at the table. Callie's. Maisie's. The high cushions Maisie sat on between Sophia and Louisa.
Callie texted an hour before.Not going to make it tonight. Maisie's tired.
I read it twice. Set the phone face-down on the counter.
Momma saw. She didn't ask. She walked to the table and picked up the plates — Callie's, then Maisie's, then the cushions — and carried them to the kitchen with her back straight and her shoulders steady and her hands so careful with those plates it was like she was putting something precious back in a drawer. She stacked them on the counter. Wiped the placemat with acloth. Adjusted the remaining settings to close the gap, the way you rearrange furniture in a room where someone used to live.
The whole family was there. Dad at the head. Momma beside him. Wyatt and Ivy across from Liam and Stephanie. Maggie and Jack. Sophia. Hunter at the far end, quiet as always. Every chair filled except two.
The table was wrong. The food was right, the conversation started the way it always did — Liam on a case, Wyatt needling him about it, Maggie debating yearling prospects with Jack — but the sound was wrong. The frequency of it. Maisie's voice was missing. Her chatter about horses and Sully and Oliver and cloud eggs and whatever outrageous negotiation she'd been running that week — gone. A silence in the shape of a kid who should have been sitting between Sophia and Louisa, asking for more potatoes.
Sophia kept glancing at the empty space beside her. She'd touch the table where Maisie's placemat had been, then pull her hand back. Even Wyatt ate faster, like sitting at a table that was supposed to have two more people and didn’t, was something he couldn't tolerate for longer than necessary.
Nobody mentioned it. Nobody had to. The absence was loud enough.
I pushed food around my plate. Ate enough to keep Momma from worrying. Tried to follow Liam's story about a jurisdictional dispute and couldn't hold the thread.
After dinner, the women moved to the kitchen. Momma washing, Stephanie drying, Maggie and Ivy clearing. Sophia disappeared upstairs. And I found myself on the back porch with my brothers — Liam on the rail, Wyatt against the post, Jack in the chair, Hunter standing the way Hunter always stood, slightly apart, watching everything.
Nobody spoke for a while. The kind of silence that happens between men who grew up in the same house and don't need to fill empty air.
Liam broke it. "Talk to us, brother."
I looked at him. Then at Wyatt. Then at Jack and Hunter. Four faces I'd known my entire life — different expressions, same eyes, same blood.
"She's pulling away." My voice came out rougher than I intended. "Cancelling Saturdays. Skipped tonight. She's documenting everything — spreadsheets, schedules, how often I'm around Maisie. She's building a case for a judge, and she's dismantling us to do it."
Wyatt's arms uncrossed. That alone told me how serious this was — Wyatt's arms were a barometer.
"She's scared," Liam said. Not a question. The Texas Ranger voice — calm, analytical, seeing the shape of things.
"She's terrified. And I — " I stopped. Breathed. Tried again. "I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know how to fight this. I've never been in a position where I loved two people this much, and the thing that's taking them away isn't something I can get in front of."
The words hung in the cold air. I hadn't said it out loud before — not to Weston, not to anyone. The full, unguarded truth of it. Clay Blackwood, who'd charmed his way through everything, who'd always had the grin and the timing and the easy confidence that made people believe he had it handled — standing on a porch admitting he was lost.
Jack leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What do you need?"
"I need to not lose them. That's all I know." I gripped the porch rail. "And if that means letting go for now — giving her the space to figure this out, even if it kills me — then that's what I do. But behind the scenes, I hold on with everything I've got. I don'twalk away. I don't disappear. I just... stand still and trust that what we built is strong enough to survive what he's doing to it."
Liam nodded slowly. "Savannah's already working the legal side. You know that."
"I know."
"So the legal war is handled. This is the other war."
Wyatt spoke. His voice was quieter than usual — Wyatt, who said everything at volume, who turned every sentence into a declaration. "You're not doing this alone. You know that, right?"
I looked at him.
"I mean it." He held my gaze. "Whatever you need. Whenever you need it. That's not a speech, that's a fact."
