The knot between my shoulder blades loosened a fraction.
"Here." Sassy pulled us to a spot at the arena fence, front row, good sightline. She released my arm and planted her hands on the top rail, bouncing on her toes. "God, I love rodeo day. Is that weird? It's totally weird."
"Not weird." I gripped the fence rail. The metal was sun-hot under my palms.
"You okay?" She turned those sharp green eyes on me. Sassy wasn't stupid. She didn't know the details—didn't know about Wyatt, didn't know about the years I'd spent running—but she'd been watching me all morning with the quiet attention of a woman who knew what not-okay looked like, even when the person wearing it was doin' their best to hide it.
"I'm good."
She studied me a beat longer than comfortable. "Okay. But if you need to bail, we bail. No questions."
I nodded. Didn't trust my voice with anything more.
The speakers crackled. The first team roping pair was announced. Two guys I didn't recognize backed their horses into the boxes, and the crowd settled into that anticipatory hush that came right before the chute opened. I'd heard it a thousand times growing up. The sound of a held breath—an entire arena full of people waiting for the same five seconds.
The chute banged. The steer broke. The horses lunged. Ropes flew.
My chest tightened, but I held.
The second team ran. Another clean run, decent time.
Brody and Rhett were third.
I watched Brody walk Speed toward the staging area, moving easy in the saddle, hat sitting just right on top of his perfect head, rope coiled at his side. He looked good up there—confident, loose, comfortable in his body in a way that I envied on my best days. Speed was alert beneath him, ears pricked, that coiled energy I'd come to recognize as a horse getting ready to do what it was born to do.
From across the arena, I caught a flash of movement in the bleachers. Two figures in the front row—one stooped, one solid. I squinted against the sun.
Granddad.
My breath caught. He was sitting next to Hank, both of them planted like fence posts, arms crossed, focused on the arena. Granddad was leaning forward slightly, like he was trying to get a better angle on the chutes.
Hank must've picked him up from the facility and driven him out here. Two ornery old bastards, side by side at the Meagher County rodeo, like they'd been doin' it for fifty years.
He'd had people. Maybe not family, butsomeone. For exactly three seconds, I forgot to be afraid.
Then I saw Denny.
He was standing near the stock pens behind the chutes—hat off, leaning against a fence panel, talkin' to a couple cowboys.
Animated. Hands moving. Laughing at his own joke the way he always did. Entirely in his element, because the rodeo was the only place my daddy had ever felt at home.
My eyes tracked left. Automatic. Instinct honed over years of knowing that wherever Denny was, Wyatt wasn't far.
I found him.
Wyatt was behind the chutes.
Not in the staging area where the ropers and their horses waited. Behind it. In the narrow corridor between the back of the boxes and the stock pens—a service area, maintenance access, the kind of space that was technically off-limits to anyone who wasn't working the gates.
He was moving along the back of the boxes. Slow. Unhurried. His hat was pulled low and he had his hands in his pockets, and to anyone glancing that way he probably looked like another cowboy who'd wandered somewhere he shouldn't be.
But he wasn't wandering. His trajectory was specific. Deliberate.
He crept toward the header's box.
Brody's box.
Where Speed was backed in, shifting his feet, coiling up.
