"You have to promise me something," I say.
"Anything."
"Don't be a hero," I tell him. My voice is firm enough that he understands I mean the specific kind of hero that gets stupid about the danger because the cause feels bigger than the risk. "Do what you need to do, get what you need to get, and come back to us. That's the whole job. Everything else is secondary."
He holds my gaze with an intensity that makes the rest of the room fall away. "Come back to you and Hadley," he says. "That's the plan I'm building everything else around."
"Good," I say, and I mean it with everything I have.
He pulls me in then, all the way, his arms wrapping around me in the solid certain way that still catches me off guard sometimes. The way that feels like something I didn't know I was missing until it was there. I press my face into his shoulder and let myself be held for a minute without managing it or measuring it or deciding in advance how much of it I'm allowed to need.
I need all of it tonight.
And he gives it without being asked.
We stand there in the kitchen long enough for the night to deepen outside the window and the house to settle fully into its quiet. I feel something shifting in me that isn't resignation and isn't acceptance exactly but lives somewhere between the two. The place where love and fear have reached an agreement and decided to coexist because neither one is going anywhere and there isn't room enough in one chest to keep fighting them against each other.
He is going to ride.
I am going to watch.
And whatever happens in that arena, we are going to face it the same way we have faced everything since the night I stopped running and he stopped holding back. Together and without pretending it isn't hard.
That has to be enough.
Tonight, it is.
He looks deep into my eyes with his hands holding my face and whispers, “I love you too.” He takes my hand and we walk into the bedroom and close the door.
The morning of the rodeo arrives the way mornings do when you've been dreading them. Too fast and too bright. The sun coming through the bedroom window with an indifference to the weight of the day that feels almost offensive.
I lie there for a moment before I move, taking stock the way I always do. Listening to the house around me. Jace is already up and moving around. The quiet deliberately sounds of a man going through a routine that has nothing to do with nervousness. He is preparing, the kind of focused pre-competition ritual I have come to recognize as the way he gets himself from here to ready.
I get up and wake Hadley. We move through the morning together. The three of us, with a domesticity that still catches me off guard sometimes in the best possible way. Pancakes at the island and Hadley asking questions nobody fully answers. Jace drinking his coffee standing up the way he always does when his mind is already somewhere ahead of his body.
My mother arrives at two in the afternoon to take Hadley. Hadley is not coming to this rodeo. A decision I made without discussion and that Jace supported without being asked. When my mother pulls up, Hadley runs out to meet her with the unbridled enthusiasm she reserves for her grandmother. I stand on the porch and watch and feel the particular bittersweet quality of a moment that is both ordinary and precious at the same time.
My mother catches my eye over Hadley's head and holds it for a second.
In that second she communicates everything that would take either of us ten minutes to say out loud. That she sees what is happening, that she approves of it, that she is proud of me for getting out of my own way long enough to let it happen. That she will keep Hadley safe today so I can do what I need to do.
I nod once.
She nods back.
That's enough. I tell Hadley I love her and have a great time with Grandma.
Jace comes to stand beside me on the porch as my mother's car disappears down the drive. His hand finds mine without ceremony. Just sliding into place the way it does now, natural and unannounced. Like we have been doing this long enough to stop requiring a decision.
"You ready?" he asks.
I look up at him, at the profile I have memorized without meaning to, the build, the strong arms and the particular way he holds himself when he is fully certain of something. I understand, in this, moment that ready is not exactly the right word for what I am but it is the closest available one.
"No," I say honestly. "But I'm going anyway."
He squeezes my hand once, firm and sure, and we go inside to finish getting our stuff ready together.
The drive to the rodeo grounds takes forty minutes. I spend most of it watching the landscape move past the window and doing the thing I used to do when I was working with kids in crisis. Taking my own emotional temperature, identifying what I'm feeling and naming it without judgment. Named things are smaller than unnamed things and I need everything I'm carrying today to be as small as it can get.
