I shook my head. “Nothing that won’t heal.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, then nodded once. “Good.”
That was it. No follow-up questions, no reassurances, no performance of concern. Just the simple acknowledgment that I was here, I was injured, but functional, and that was enough information to proceed.
I was still trying to process the exchange when movement from the side of the barn caught my eye. Two toddlers came toddling around the corner, one slightly ahead of the other, both barely steady on their feet. They were identical—same round faces, same shock of dark hair, same serious expressions as they made their unsteady way across the gravel.
The one in front—a boy, from the blue overalls—was moving faster than his coordination could support. He took three rapid steps, lost his balance, and went down hard on the gravel, hands splayed, face hitting the ground with an audible thud.
The crying started immediately—the wail of genuine pain rather than any real upset. I was across the yard before I’d made a conscious decision to move, muscle memory taking over where thought left off.
I crouched beside the child, one hand cupped around the back of his small head, the other already reaching for his handsto check for damage. “Hey,” I said, voice dropping into the low, even register I’d used in the NICU. “Hey, buddy. Let me see.”
His face was screwed up with the effort of crying, fat tears tracking down round cheeks, a scrape already forming on one palm where he’d caught himself. I used the hem of my shirt to wipe the gravel from the wound, talking him through it in the same steady voice—acknowledging the pain without feeding the fear, creating a space where hurt could exist without being the whole story.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, keeping my voice matter-of-fact. “Yeah, it does. Scrapes hurt. But you know what? They get better really fast. Faster than you’d think.”
The crying slowed, then stopped, the child’s attention caught by the novelty of being spoken to like a person with agency rather than a problem to be solved. The other child, a girl, had stopped a few feet away, watching the scene with wide eyes, clearly unsure whether she should be upset too.
“That’s it,” I said, brushing a final piece of gravel from the boy’s palm. “All clean. You want to try standing up?”
He nodded, lower lip still trembling slightly, and reached for my hand. I helped him to his feet, keeping my grip light, letting him find his balance on his own terms.
“There you go,” I said. “Good as new.”
Only when the immediate crisis was resolved did I remember where I was—kneeling in the gravel of a Montana ranch at dawn, a toddler’s tears drying on my shirt, two adults watching the scene with unreadable expressions.
I looked up, suddenly aware of how the situation must appear—a stranger with a bruised face appearing out of nowhere to tend to a child who wasn’t mine.
Rawley’s expression had changed, the careful neutrality giving way to something that looked almost like recognition. Heturned to Decker, who had moved to stand a few paces behind me, and said two words that changed my fate forever: “He stays.”
Not a question. Not even really a decision—more like the acknowledgment of something that had already been decided.
Decker nodded once. “I’ll get him settled.”
Rawley turned back to me, his face settling into its previous neutrality. “You need anything, tell Deck,” he said. “He knows where everything is.” Then, to the toddler, who had recovered enough to be eyeing me with suspicious interest: “Ethan, Margot, this is Jasper. He’s going to be staying with us for a while.”
The child—Ethan—regarded me with the focus of the very young, then nodded once, apparently satisfied with whatever assessment he’d made. He took the little girl’s hand and the two of them toddled back toward the house, already moving on to the next adventure.
I stood up, dusting gravel from my knees, and nodded once at Rawley. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t have formed the words if I’d tried. But the word “stay” landed somewhere in my chest and stuck there, a physical weight I could feel with each breath.
I hadn’t known, until just this moment, how badly I needed to hear it.
Chapter Four
~ Jasper ~
I woke with a start, breath caught halfway in my throat, one arm flung out to catch myself against a fall that had already happened. The room around me was unfamiliar—narrow bed, quilted coverlet, thin curtains filtering pale morning light through a single east-facing window. Not my apartment in Omaha. Not my grandfather’s spare room. Somewhere else entirely.
I lay still, waiting for the fear to catch up with me the way it had every morning for months. The jump in my pulse, the tight band across my chest, the absolute certainty that something worse was coming—it was all familiar, like an old friend showing up at the door.
But the room was too quiet, the mattress too soft, the smell of coffee and wood smoke drifting under the door too ordinary to belong to anything dangerous. The ordinariness of it was its own disorientation—a sensory correction my body didn’t know how to process yet.
My ribs ached when I shifted my weight, the tender spot just under my left arm protesting as I pushed myself upright. The bruise climbing my cheekbone pulled tight when I turned my face toward the light, a fresh reminder of last night’s encounter in the side yard. I pressed my fingertips to the edge of it and winced. Swollen, but not hot—no infection yet.
It would be even colorful by tomorrow.
I’d fallen asleep in my clothes. My jeans were wrinkled, my shirt still smelled of Nebraska, and my socks were starting to reek after the long drive. I needed a shower, clean clothes, and a plan for what came next—none of which I had.
