"Can Bella stay for this?" he asked. "Your call."
Rory looked at me. Then back at him. "Yeah."
He came in. He didn't move toward me or toward the bag. He pulled the chair from the desk and sat in it, set his elbows on his knees, and looked at his daughter like he was working out how to start something he should have started months ago.
"I treated your hope like it was the problem," he said. "Every time you hoped for something and got hurt, I thought — if I could just stop you hoping so hard, I could stop you hurting. But that's not —" He stopped. His jaw worked. "That's not how it works. And I knew that. I just didn't know what else to do."
Rory was very still.
"You're strong," he said. "I know you're strong. I've watched you be strong through things I wouldn't have known how to handle at your age. I kept thinking I was protecting you, but I was just… I was asking you to need less. So I'd feel better."
The silence in the room grew heavier.
"The album," he said. "What you built. Those photographs." He shook his head, slow. "I've never seen myself like that. I didn't know how to say that. I said the wrong thing."
Rory looked down at the printed pages in her hands.
"I see you," he said. "I see your talent, and I see what you're doing with it, and I should have said that first."
She crossed the room in three steps, and he caught her before she got there with one arm around her, pulling her in. She didn't cry. She just held on, her face turned away, the album pressed between them.
I looked at the window, trying not to interfere in their moment by pretending I wasn’t there at all.
After a moment, Jace reached behind his back and put something on the desk without letting go of Rory. It was a camera. Not a phone, not a loaner — a proper mirrorless body, compact and well-made, with a strap already fitted. Next to it, he placed a laminated card. An approved photography pass for Walker Ranch Rodeo Events, with Rory's name printed on it.
Rory pulled back far enough to look at the desk. She stared at the camera for a long moment.
"That's mine?"
"Yours."
She picked it up with the careful, deliberate hands of someone who understood exactly what she was holding.
"Go test it," he said. "Horses are still out."
She went, already pulling off the lens cap before she hit the stairs.
Jace turned his full attention on me.
The bag on the bed was still open. Neither of us looked at it.
"I made you prove you'd stay," he said, "before I made any room for you to belong here. That's backwards." He held my gaze. "I'm sorry."
I'd come up with plenty of things to say when I packed the bag. Good, clear, self-preserving things. I'd been composing them in the back of my head since last night, solid and reasonable, the kind of sentences I was better at than most because I'd had to explain my own exits to a lot of people and I'd gotten efficient at it.
None of them came to mind now.
"I built my whole career around leaving," I said. "Before anyone could decide I wasn't worth staying for. I leave first and I call it independence and I've done it my whole adult life."
He didn't say anything.
"I don't want to leave this time." The words sat strange in my mouth, too plain, the way true things sometimes are. "That terrifies me."
"I know."
"You can't just say that."
"I know that too." He crossed the room, not fast, just closing the distance with the same quiet deliberateness he carried with him everywhere. He stopped close enough that I had to tip my head back to meet his gaze. "Stay. Make this your base. Come and go on assignments. That's your work and I'm not asking you to stop. But when you come home, come back here." His hand came up and settled at my jaw, his thumb against my cheekbone. "Come back to us."
