It's gone now.
Laney is already at the barn when I get there, same as always, moving through the morning feed rounds with the unhurried efficiency I've watched enough times that I could do it in my sleep.
She looks up when I come through the door, hands me a coffee from the thermos on the shelf by the entrance, goes back to what she's doing.
I didn't bring coffee, and she made two.
That small ordinary thing hits me the same way it hits me every morning, which is harder than it has any right to for a cup of coffee. It's just two cups. It's also not just two cups at all and we both know it.
"Morning," she says.
"Morning." I take the coffee, fall into step beside her, start on the water checks while she finishes the feed. We move through the barn in the easy parallel rhythm that has developed between us over weeks of mornings exactly like this one.
Biscuit watches me from his stall with his large patient eyes.
"You're looking smug," I tell him.
He blinks.
"Don't," I say.
Laney glances over. "Are you talking to Biscuit again?"
"He started it."
She shakes her head and keeps moving. I catch the small smile she's not bothering to hide anymore and think that this, specifically this, is what I drove all night from San Francisco for without knowing it.
The barn in the early morning. Coffee made by someone who knows how you take it. Biscuit standing there with his smug expression while Laney smiles without bothering to hide it anymore.
This exact thing.
Remy arrives at six with Silas and the morning moves into its usual rhythm, tasks divided without discussion, the crew operating with the particular efficiency of people who know each other well enough that communication has become mostly shorthand.
Remy says three words and Silas knows what he means. Laney tilts her head and I know what she needs.
Six weeks ago I was reading about this in books.
Now I'm inside it.
Earl Bishop told me last week that ranching gets into your blood or it doesn't, and you know which one pretty fast. I've been thinking about that.
About what it means that I wake up before five without an alarm, that my hands know how to work a fence line, that I can read the weather coming in from the west by the way the horses are moving in the pasture.
It's in my blood.
I don't know exactly when it happened.
I know it's not going anywhere.
I finish the water checks and find Laney at the barn door looking out at the ranch in the early light with her coffee in both handsand that expression she gets in quiet moments, open, settled, completely herself.
I stand beside her.
She leans into my shoulder slightly without looking at me.
I stay very still so I don't disturb it.
The ranch breathes around us, the quiet settling deep into my chest.
