And somehow that feels worse.
The difference between those two things is about to become a significant problem.
Chapter sixteen
Misunderstandings
Laney
Iknow what exit means.
I've been in enough conversations about ranch properties, land values, operational turnovers to know exactly what that word means in the context of a business call with a former partner who wants to know how the investment is performing.
It means selling.
It means evaluating what you have against the value someone else might place on it, then making a decision based on numbers rather than anything else.
It means looking at Silver Mesa Ranch the way Marcus Webb looks at it, as an asset with a market value and an appreciation curve and a clean exit opportunity if the timing is right.
It means leaving.
I lie on my cabin porch in the dark after midnight and turn that word over in my head the way I've been turning it over since two o'clock this afternoon.
It doesn't get any better with handling.
He said he wasn't looking to exit.
I heard that part.
I also heard the careful way he said it. The half second pause before the answer. The particular tone of a man choosing words rather than just saying them. I've spent enough time learning Beckett Wilder's rhythms to know the difference between a spontaneous answer and a managed one.
That was a managed one.
Which means the question landed somewhere real.
Which means the option exists in his head in a way it didn't before Marcus Webb called to plant it there.
I pull my jacket tighter and look out at the dark ranch and try to have an honest conversation with myself about what I'm feeling.
Not the fear. I know what the fear is. I've been living with the fear since the morning after the last time we had sex.
When I lay in the dark and made peace with it and decided to be brave anyway.
What I'm feeling underneath the fear is something older.
Familiar.
The hollow feeling of someone who has started to believe in something right before the ground shifts under it. I know this feeling the way you know a scar, not with surprise but with recognition.
I built something here.
Four years of mornings before sunrise, of decisions made in the best interest of this land, of relationships grown slowly into something that feels like family.
I built it carefully, deliberately, with the full knowledge that it lived on someone else's deed and the full choice to love it anyway.
Then Beckett arrived and I built something else.
Something I didn't plan for and couldn't have prevented and chose fully with both eyes open when I finally stopped arguing with myself about it.
