We sit on the porch in the Sunday quiet and I think that the missing kind of happy has been found on both sides of this equation.
I think Maisie knows that too.
I think she's known it longer than either of us.
The realization arrives on Monday morning without fanfare. Not a lightning bolt or a dramatic moment with a soundtrack. Just a regular Monday morning on a working ranch.
The horses are fed, the crew is moving through their tasks. The Texas sun doing its usual relentless work on the temperature.
I'm standing at the barn door with my coffee watching Beckett cross the yard toward the equipment shed with his hat on and his work gloves tucked into his back pocket. His notebook under his arm.
Just that.
Just him crossing the yard the way he crosses it every morning now, unhurried, purposeful, completely at home in a space that several months ago he could barely navigate without causing an irrigation incident.
I am fully, completely, without reservation in love with this man.
Not the careful version. Not the managed, monitored, one foot out the door version I've been practicing my whole adult life. The full version. The kind my mother had, the kind I spent thirty-three years being afraid of because of what it cost her every time it walked out the door.
The full kind.
And somehow that doesn't make me nervous anymore.
It's also the least terrifying it has ever been.
I think that's because of the difference between loving something that's leaving and loving something permanent.
And I know, in the specific bone deep way I've learned to trust over the past months, which one this is.
Remy appears beside me at the barn door with his coffee and his hat and the morning version of himself that is slightly less chaotic than the afternoon version.
He looks at Beckett crossing the yard.
Looks at my face.
"There it is," he says quietly.
I look at him. "What."
"The face." He sips his coffee. "The real one. The one you've been working up to since approximately the irrigation disaster in week two."
I look back at the yard. Beckett has reached the equipment shed, stopped to say something to Silas, he. is laughing at whatever Silas said back which must be genuinely funny because Silas doesn't say unfunny things.
"I love him," I say. Out loud. To Remy. At seven in the morning.
Remy is quiet for a moment.
Then he says, "I know."
"I've loved him for a while."
"I know that too."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
He looks at me with the quiet expression he reserves for moments of genuine feeling that he doesn't want to undercut with humor.
"Because it wasn't mine to say." He pauses. "And because watching you figure it out was one of the more entertaining things I've witnessed on this ranch. Which is saying something given the irrigation situation."
