I hauled the suitcase over the threshold, breathing tight in my chest by the time I got it inside. Something bit sharp and deep in my hip, and I rode the pain for a while. Then, when it eased enough to move, and driven by anger at my greeting, I hauled the case forward.
Yes, I’d lied to Jesse. He’d called me on my desire to sell, and I hadn’t exactly come out and told him that, of course, I was selling.
“What does he expect me to do with it?” I muttered as the case swung and hit my knee. “Keep it? Sell cows? Ride ahorse?” Yes, I wanted the money. I wanted it badly enough to agree to this six-month garbage and uproot my life and drive into the middle of nowhere with my spine already screaming and my patience shot. I wanted to sell because this wasn’t my life, and the money because it made sense. Money could be turned into beds, staff, and second chances for kids who never got one. And because it mattered, I couldn’t afford to spiral. I shoved everything else down and focused on the next step.
I let out a humorless laugh at the door, anger and defensiveness tangling together. This place. This house. Six months of having to live here to get the money.
I’d planned to ease Jesse into it, play nice, and hope he’d be as eager to sell. I hauled in the boxes and shut the front door. I noticed the cold first, and that the air smelled of dust and old wood. The entryway was dim even in daylight, light from the windows dulled by grime and age. A thin layer of dust coated the sideboard, the boot tray, the framed print of a mountain range that might once have meant something to someone. I dragged my finger through it without thinking and stared at the clean line I left behind.
This wasn’t what I’d expected.
It felt sad.
And empty.
I’d assumed Jesse was living here now, but maybe I was wrong? Maybe I’d have this mausoleum of a crappy place all to myself. No one living here with me, rotting boards, dead lights, dust thick enough to write your name in. A shrine to stubbornness and bad decisions.
I dragged the suitcase again and moved further inside,every step echoing too loudly, and the staircase rose ahead, narrow and steep, the banister worn smooth by decades of hands, spiderwebs in the corner thick with dust. Jesus.
The case snagged on the first step and brought me up short, leaving me face-to-face with the first of many photographs lining the stairs. So many people.
At the bottom, the photos were in black and white. A man and a woman standing in front of this very house, younger than I’d ever imagined them, and smiling. I wiped a sleeve through the dust and guessed this was my grandfather, which would make the woman beside him his wife—Isobel, Bella, something like that. Then there was a group shot where the clothes shifted, hairlines changed, the years ticking forward with every step I climbed. No photos of the couple holding a baby—aka their son, my dad, the man who’d let bitterness rot him from the inside out, then took it out on everyone stupid enough to be close.
Or on the ones like me who couldn’t get away.
The sixties bled into the seventies. Color crept in, muted at first, then brighter. People aged, there were some cows, or steers, probably prize ones I imagined, and in all of them, the ranch photos stayed the same.
I stared at the photo on the wall. A group shot. Cowboys lined up shoulder to shoulder, thumbs hooked into belt loops, all of them wearing the same half-bored, half-unbreakable expression.
“Where will the staff go?” Dalton had asked me over coffee on my last day.
“I’ll make sure there are financial solutions for everyone,” I’d explained, and Dalton hadnodded.
But back in the city, the numbers behaved. The land didn’t. And neither did the people. Numbers and timelines that made sense on paper, made me happy. I’d built outcomes that worked. For me. For investors. For a charity spreadsheet. But families and communities like the ones in these photos weren’t line items.
Exactly what Dalton had said after a pause.
I don’t have room for a conscience.
Softness didn’t keep the lights on at the charity, and I wantedeverythingfor the kids who found the shelter. I wanted safety for them and a future that didn’t hinge on luck.
Six months. Done. No one here matters to me. It’s not like my grandpa rescued me from my shitty life with Dad. I don’t owe anyone.
I climbed slowly, my hip pulling with each step, my attention snagged by every frame, and at the top of the stairs, I stopped.
The last photograph was smaller than the others, set in a simple frame that didn’t match anything below it. A baby in a basket, posed against a backdrop. Studio lighting. Professional. I knew that instantly, because my mother had once filled the dining room of our childhood home with the whole series of these very photos.
My father had destroyed them the day he’d thrown me out; the tiny scar on my temple never quite healed right from where the biggest frame had slammed into my head.
I stared at the photo, throat tight.
It was me. I was all fluffy hair and rolls of baby fat, cheeks full, eyes creased and watery as if I was only seconds fromcrying. Someone had hung the photo at the top of the stairs, where it would be seen every day, and I had to assume it was my grandfather who’d put it there.
As if he cared.
If he fucking cared, he would have let me live here.
I stood there longer than made sense, suitcase balanced on the step and leaning on my leg, staring at evidence that was yet another complication in everything I thought I knew. This waspretendcaring; this was him announcing they had a grandson, as if it were an achievement, then shutting me out of his life, as good as pretending I was dead.
