She holds my gaze for a long moment.
Doesn't look away.
Doesn't take a step back.
We get Biscuit settled around two in the morning.
He drinks, which is a good sign. His vitals have evened out, the restless uncomfortable energy is gone, he's back to his usual patient self. Laney checks him one final time, runs her hand down his neck, says something quiet to him that I don't catch. He bumps her palm with his nose.
She latches the stall door and we stand in the barn aisle in the particular stillness of two people who have just come down from something.
Aren't quite sure what to do with the landing.
"Coffee?" I say.
She looks at me for a second. "It's two in the morning."
"I know."
She looks at the barn door. Looks back at me. "Yeah," she says. "Okay."
We walk to the ranch house through the warm dark, not talking, not quite touching. The night around us is full of cricket noise and the distant sound of cattle settling. The ranch house kitchen is exactly as I left it when I went to bed, and then Remy woke me up, my book face down on the counter, a half empty glass of water beside it.
I make coffee.
Laney sits at the kitchen island, her hair still loose, her boots crossed at the ankle on the bottom rail of the stool, her hands wrapped around the mug I slide across to her. She looks like someone who has stopped performing altogether and is simply present in a room at two in the morning.
Her eyes drift toward the book still sitting face down on the counter.
"What are you reading now?" she asks. "Advanced emotional support for billionaires?"
I look at the book. "Horse first aid, actually."
The corner of her mouth lifts. "Well look at you. Growing as a person."
It might be the most beautiful she's looked since I got here.
That's a thought I keep to myself.
We drink our coffee in the quiet kitchen and the house settles around us with its particular nighttime sounds and somewhere upstairs Maisie is sleeping with total abandon the way she always does.
"Tell me about San Francisco," Laney says. Not pushing. Just asking, the way people ask things at two in the morning when the usual rules about what you're allowed to want to know have gone soft at the edges.
I look at my coffee. "What do you want to know?"
"What it was actually like. Not the version you'd tell someone at a business lunch."
I'm quiet for a moment. She waits without filling it, which is one of her particular skills that I've come to rely on more than I should.
"Lonely," I say finally. "It was lonely in a way that's hard to explain when you're surrounded by people constantly." I turn the mug in my hands. "I built something real. Wilder Capital was a genuine thing, not just money, it solved problems, moved resources toward places that needed them. I was proud of it for a long time."
"What changed?"
"I stopped being able to feel proud of it anymore." I look up at her. "I'd close a deal that should've felt like a win, sit in my car in the parking garage, feel nothing. Just this hollow quiet where the satisfaction used to be." I pause. "I knew something was wrong when I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd done something just because it felt good. Everything was strategic.
Everything had a purpose beyond itself."
Laney is quiet, listening with her whole attention in the way she does.
