She didn't push. Didn't angle for access she hadn't been given. When she photographed the horses, she stayed at the rail, and she was so steady out there that Cutter—the bay gelding who'd spooked at everything from wind to his own reflection for three years—stopped skittering when she was around.
She shot at dawn most mornings before I was done with the first feeding, and by the time I came back around, she was usually gone, her boot prints in the soft ground near the fence the only sign she'd been there.
It would've been easier if she'd overstepped. Something I could point to. A reason. Instead, she was just there. Careful and quiet and entirely too good at disappearing into the background of a place she'd only been living in for a few days.
Rory was the problem I'd seen coming and hadn't figured out how to stop. She'd been circling Bella's orbit since the rodeo’s opening weekend.
I was replacing a split rail on the south fence when Rory came out from the barn direction instead of the house, which meant she'd been inside, which meant she'd been where she wasn't supposed to be without telling me.
“You were in the barn.”
“Bella was taking texture shots.” Rory pulled her hair over one shoulder, not quite meeting my eye. “She said it was okay.”
“I said she could take texture shots. I didn't say you could.”
“I was just watching.”
“You've got chores.”
“I finished them all.” She looked at me like she wanted to dare me to argue with her. “She was showing me how she brackets exposures. It's not like I was in the way.”
I set the post driver down. “Rory.”
“I want to help. She said I could assist?—”
“No.”
My voice came out louder and rougher than I meant it to. Rory's whole face closed off in that way she had, like a shutter coming down. I recognized it because she'd learned it from me.
“Fine,” she said.
She walked back to the house, and I stood there with the fence post and the poor excuse I hadn't even had the decency to say out loud. It wasn't about the chores. It wasn't about Bella. It was about Rory spending time building something with a woman who had a return ticket to wherever she'd come from, and me having no idea how to explain that without sounding like I was the problem.
Which maybe I was.
The June workload at the rodeo grounds became relentless. Between the article Rachel had written and the pictures in Western Dust, Mustang Mountain had become a destination instead of a small-town people accidentally discovered.
After the success of opening weekend, the town was scrambling to build a Father's Day Family Rodeo. Slade wanted it bigger with more handlers, more events, a family clinic, and a kids' barrel course.
That meant I was splitting my time between the rodeo grounds and managing my own property. My days consisted of coordinating stock, reviewing layouts, and arguing with an equipment rental company about arena panels that had a four-week lead time.
Bella shadowed me through all of it. That was what Slade wanted. She kept to the edges the same way she kept to the edges of my property. Camera up, close enough to work, far enough that I could almost forget she was there.
Father's Day was all anyone could talk about. I kept running into the phrase in planning documents, on the whiteboard in the events office, and in Slade's emails. Each time I did, my gut pulled the same direction.
My ex, Dana, had been inconsistent since the divorce. That was the nicest way of putting it. Working on the kind of event built around the theme of happy families doing happy family things had a way of sending my blood pressure climbing.
I’d tried to work things out for my daughter’s sake, but Dana was hellbent on getting out of Mustang Mountain and had no interest in taking our daughter with her. Not that I would have let her. I would have fought that battle down to my last breath. It just pissed me off that my kid was left with a hole in her heart that I couldn’t fix.
I was reviewing the arena layout on Thursday afternoon when Bella's camera clicked somewhere to my left.
“You're doing that thing,” she said.
“What thing?”
“The shoulder thing.” She lowered the camera. “From Memorial Day.”
I looked at her. She wasn't smiling, but there was something in her expression that was close to it. Like she was aware she was walking near a line.
