"You've been making shelving decisions on this ranch for four years without my input."
"New era," he says cheerfully. "Collaborative approach."
Maisie finishes her toast, takes my hand, and suddenly I am outnumbered.
We all know it.
We spend the morning rearranging the tack room, which turns out to actually need rearranging, and I make a note that Remy occasionally disguises genuine ranch work inside elaborate social engineering and that I should probably respect that more than I do.
It's around eleven when I hear Laney on the phone outside the barn.
I'm not eavesdropping. I'm returning a set of bridles to the hook near the barn door and she's standing just around the corner and her voice carries clearly in the morning air before I realize I should probably make some noise to announce myself.
I stop.
She's talking to June. I can tell from the particular tone she uses, relaxed, open, the one she reserves for people she trusts completely.
"I don't know what to do with it," she's saying. Quiet. Honest. "It's not like before. Cole was easy to walk away from in hindsight. Marcus too.
This is different.
I know it's different, and that's exactly the part that scares me."
A pause while June says something.
"Because it feels like home," Laney says. Even quieter. "He feels like home. The whole thing does. Silver Mesa, Maisie, all of it.
It feels like something I was always supposed to have in my life.
And that terrifies me because I don't know how to protect myself from something I actually want to keep."
Another pause.
"I know," she says softly. "I know June."
I stand very still inside the barn door with a set of bridles in my hands.
Something moves through my chest, so large and so certain that I have to breathe through it carefully before I trust my legs to work properly.
She feels it too.
All of it.
I hang the bridles on the hook with extreme care and walk quietly back into the barn and sit down on a hay bale and look at the dust moving in the light coming through the barn window.
She feels like home.
She said it out loud to June Calloway on a Saturday morning and didn't know I was listening and meant every word.
I sit on that hay bale for a solid five minutes.
I finally get up.
Because there are shelving decisions to make. A ranch to build.
And a woman outside that barn who just told me everything I needed to hear without meaning to tell me at all.
I know exactly what I'm going to do about it.
