The kitchen light is on.
Something warm moves through my chest so fast I barely catch it before it disappears again.
I pick up my feed bucket and get back to work.
Maisie finds me at the round pen at eight o'clock.
She appears after breakfast with Rowdy at her heels and whatever project she's decided on for the morning and installs herself wherever I am with the comfortable certainty of someone who has never once questioned whether she's welcome.
She's never had to question it.
She climbs the fence rail and settles herself on the top rung with her boots hooked on the second one.
Then she looks at me with those serious, observant eyes that I have learned to both appreciate and be slightly afraid of.
"You had breakfast already?" I ask.
"Dad made eggs." She pauses. "They were pretty good actually. He's been practicing."
Something moves through my chest at that. Beckett standing in his kitchen at seven in the morning practicing eggs. I file it somewhere I shouldn't and keep working.
"He seemed happy this morning," Maisie says.
I focus on the fence latch I'm adjusting. "That's good."
"Like really happy. He was humming."
"People hum."
"Dad doesn't hum." She says it with the authority of someone who has conducted extensive research on the subject. "He whistles sometimes when he thinks nobody can hear him. But he doesn't hum." She tilts her head. "He was humming this morning."
I have nothing useful to say to that so I say nothing.
Maisie swings her boots against the fence rail in a comfortable rhythm. Rowdy circles the base of the fence twice and drops himself in the dirt with a heavy sigh.
The morning sits warm around us, unhurried, the ranch moving through its usual rhythms.
"Laney," Maisie says.
"Mm."
"Are you happy here?"
I look up at her. She's watching me with an expression that is entirely too perceptive for an eight year old, her chin slightly tilted, waiting with the particular patience of a child who has asked an important question and fully intends to receive an honest answer.
I lean on the fence rail and look out at the ranch. The horses moving in the far pasture. The hill line catching the morning light.
The barn sitting solid and familiar against the blue sky. My cabin porch visible from here, the coffee mug I left on the railing still there from this morning.
"Yeah," I say honestly. "I'm happy here."
"Did you used to not be?"
I think about that. "I was always okay. The ranch has always felt like home. But okay and happy aren't exactly the same thing."
She considers this with great seriousness. "Dad used to just be okay too," she says. "In San Francisco. He smiled, but it didn't always go all the way up to his eyes."
She demonstrates by smiling with just her mouth, a perfect imitation of a polite expression with nothing behind it. "Like that."
