"Of our morning schedule. It's color coded." She tilts her head. "Red is non-negotiable. Yellow is flexible. Green is aspirational.
Which somehow makes Beckett sound less like a ranch owner and more like a corporate motivational speaker trapped in cowboy boots." She pauses. "I don't know what aspirational means but my slot is green so I think it means I can sleep in if I want."
I press my lips together and turn back to the water line. "Smart kid."
She takes that as an invitation, which I'm learning is how Maisie Wilder operates. Every opening is an invitation. She drifts into the barn the way water finds low ground, natural and inevitable, and stops in front of the nearest stall where a gray quarter horse named Biscuit is watching her with his large, patient eyes.
"Can I pet him?"
"Hold your hand flat. Let him come to you."
She does it immediately, no hesitation, palm out and steady. Biscuit stretches his nose toward her and she goes very still in the way that kids do when they're trying so hard to be good that it's almost painful to watch. He bumps her hand once. She exhales like she's been holding her breath for an hour.
"He's so soft," she whispers.
"That's Biscuit. He's about as gentle as they come."
"Does he have a favorite food?"
"Apples. Cut them in quarters first or he gets greedy."
She files that away with the focused intensity of someone taking notes on something important. Then she looks at me sideways,still keeping her hand near Biscuit's nose. "Are you mad at my dad?"
The question lands without warning, the way questions from eight-year-olds tend to do. Clean and direct and completely without malice.
"No," I say carefully. "We're still figuring each other out."
She considers that. "He's not mean," she says. "He just talks about things like they're problems to solve. My grandma says it's how he shows he cares." She scratches Biscuit lightly between the eyes.
"He drove all night to get here. He thought I was asleep but I wasn't."
I don't say anything to that.
"He kept looking out the window," she adds quietly. "Like he was looking for something."
Then, because apparently emotional devastation has a strict eight-second limit with children, she wrinkles her nose.
"He also spilled coffee on himself in Amarillo because he tried driving and opening creamer at the same time."
I blink.
"Dad said the steering wheel overreacted."
Biscuit blows a soft breath against her palm and she smiles, wide and unguarded, and something in my chest shifts in a way I immediately decide not to examine.
Rowdy chooses that moment to barrel into the barn, skid on the loose hay, and crash directly into a feed bucket with a noise like a small explosion.
Maisie immediately giggles.
I go back to work and tell myself that's the only reason I'm smiling.
By mid-morning the ranch is running the way it always runs, which is to say with controlled chaos and a soundtrack of Remy's commentary that nobody asked for and nobody can seem to stop.
I'm helping Silas with a section of fence line near the east pasture when Beckett appears on the four-wheeler, which he is driving with the careful, slightly rigid posture of a man who has read about four-wheelers but clearly hasn't spent much time on one.
He pulls up alongside us, cuts the engine, and climbs off with the studied casualness of someone pretending they weren't gripping the handlebars too hard the whole way out.
"Thought I'd see what you were working on," he says.
