The corner of her mouth lifted. "Yesterday."
She stood there a beat longer than she needed to. I stood there right along with her, hands in my pockets, not pushin'. Then she reached up and gripped the front of my shirt, pulled me down, and kissed me once—firm and unhurried and deliberate—before lettin' go and turnin' for her truck.
I watched her pull out of the lot. Watched the truck until it disappeared around the corner onto Main.
Then I stood there a second longer in the quiet of the empty lot, the morning settlin' around me, and did my level best not to read too much into the fact that she hadn't looked back.
The Birmingham spreadwas my first stop, and I was grateful for it. Bart's boys ran a tight operation and, more importantly, they weren't talkers. We got on with it.
I'd trimmed and shod the six Birmingham horses—three workin' horses and three family mares—just over a month back, so today it was time to do it all again. I moved through them steady, the familiar rhythm of it settlin' into my muscles before I'd fully woken up. Nippers, rasp, the soft grunt of a horse shiftin' its weight. The smell of hoof and hay and dry summer dirt.
This was what I knew. What I was good at.
I'd been shoin' horses since I was sixteen, apprenticed under my dad's old farrier until the man retired and handed me his client list like a gift I hadn't known I needed. Now I covered most of Meagher County—a hundred-mile radius of ranches and homesteads and the occasional rodeo outfit passin' through. It wasn't glamorous work. It was good, hard work and your back paid for it by forty if you weren't careful. But there was somethin' about it—the patience it required, the way a horse either trusted you or it didn't and you couldn't fake your way to either—that suited me down to the bone.
Cole Birmingham held the last mare steady while I finished her hinds.
"Sullivans picked up two new quarter horses," he offered.
"I know." I set the hoof down and straightened, pressin' a fist to my lower back. "That's my next stop."
"Old man Sullivan'll talk your ear clean off about their bloodlines."
"He always does."
I packed my tools, accepted Cole's cash with a nod, and loaded up the truck.
He wasn't wrong about Sullivan.
The two new quarter horses were young and green and needed the full treatment—clean, shape, shoe—which meant time and patience and a fair bit of convincin' on the younger one, who'd clearly not had enough handlin' and had opinions about the whole process. I didn't rush her. Never did with a green horse. You rushed them once and you paid for it for years. I just kept my voice low and my movements slow until she decided I wasn't worth the fuss and let me get on with it.
Sullivan himself was perched on the fence the whole time, coffee in hand, deep in the particulars of both horses' pedigree. I offered the occasionalmmandis that rightwhile my hands did what they knew.
My mind kept slidin' back to Calvin.
The way she'd looked in my kitchen this mornin'. The flannel. The toast she'd taken without askin'. The kiss in the parkin' lot—hard and quick, like a punctuation mark she'd decided on and meant.
I set a hoof down a little harder than I intended and the younger mare tossed her head.
"Easy," I murmured, runnin' a hand down her flank. "Sorry, girl. My fault."
Sullivan didn't notice, still deep in the Kentucky Derby contender from twelve years back. I recentered, took a breath, and got back to it.
Last stop was out past the county line. Widow Pearson. Eighty-one years old, lived alone on forty acres she refused to sell to the developer who'd been circlin' for years, and kept one ancient mare named Biscuit who had to be pushin' thirty and moved like she felt it in her bones.
I'd been comin' out here three years. Charged her half of what I charged everyone else and told her it was a senior discount when she asked. She brought me lemonade every time—real lemonade, hand-squeezed, poured into a mason jar—asked after my mother, and told me I needed a haircut.
Biscuit got nothing but the gentlest trim I had in me. Her hooves were soft with age and she bore the whole thing with the dignified tolerance of the very old and very tired. I took my time with her. Wasn't any reason to hurry.
Today Widow Pearson told me I looked different.
"Do I?" I kept my eyes on Biscuit's near fore.
"Somethin' on your mind." Not a question. She didn't waste words on questions she already knew the answer to.
"Might be."
She made a sound that managed to convey both satisfaction and suspicion at the same time. "Girl?"
