"You don't have to," he said quietly. "I mean it. We can just take her for a walk around the paddock on the lead. That's enough."
I looked at Maribel.
She had turned her head slightly toward me, one dark eye patient and still. A horse that had been loved carefully for years by a good, gentle man who was no longer here to love her. She wasn't restless. Wasn't anxious. She was just… waiting. The same way she'd been waiting for more than a year in that dim stall.
My chest squeezed.
I put my foot in the stirrup.
My hands shook as I gripped the saddle horn. My heart was slamming so hard I was certain Brody could hear it. For one suspended second I was twelve years old again, standing in the center of this paddock, and the world was about to crack open beneath my feet.
Then Maribel shifted her weight slightly, settling under me, and exhaled a long, slow breath through her nose.
Just that. Just a breath. Completely unbothered by the wreck of a woman on her back.
I swung up.
The saddle creaked beneath me. The ground was a long way down. I sat very still and focused on breathing—in through my nose, out through my mouth—while the world reorganized itself around this new reality. Brody hadn't moved. Hadn't said a word. His hand rested lightly on Maribel's neck, nothing more.
When my lungs found their rhythm, I gathered the reins and asked her forward with the softest press of my heel.
She walked on like it was the easiest thing in the world.
The creak of the saddle. The gentle four-beat rhythm of her hooves on packed dirt. The warm solidity of her beneath me, steady and certain and nothing like the terrified animal that had ended my mother's life in an instant. Maribel moved like she had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it well.
My hands loosened their death grip on the reins by degrees. My shoulders came down from around my ears. My hips stopped bracing and started listening, finding the rhythm instead of fighting it.
We went in slow, wide circles.
I don't know how many. Didn't count. Didn't think about anything beyond the next step and the one after that, the creak of the leather and the evening birdsong and the warm smell of horse and summer rising up around me. At some point the tears came—quiet ones, nothing dramatic, just my eyes leaking without permission—and I let them because there was nobody to see and nothing to explain.
Except when I finally looked over at the fence, Brody was there.
Arms folded over the top rail, chin resting on his forearms, watching us with a smile that was soft and private and not meant to be seen. His eyes were wet in the evening light. He didn't wipe them. Didn't look away when I caught him.
I pressed my palm flat against Maribel's warm neck.
Neither of us said a word about any of it.
We untacked Maribeltogether in a comfortable quiet, the kind that had stopped feeling like something that needed filling. I ran a brush along her neck while Brody worked the saddle off, and she stood with her eyes half-closed and her lower lip loose, leaning into the attention like she'd been starved of it.
"Good girl," I murmured against her nose when we were done. She nudged my cheek, and I grinned..
Brody latched her stall door and turned to look at me across the aisle. Something in his expression made me look away first, which was new and annoying.
He disappeared into the tack room and a moment later I heard the crackle and hiss of an old radio coming to life, the dial turning through static until it landed on something clear. A steel guitar bled out into the barn, low and sweet, followed by a voice I didn't recognize singing something slow about a porch light left on.
Brody reappeared in the tack room doorway, hip leaned against the frame, one hand extended.
"Dance with me."
I looked at his hand. Looked at him. "In a barn?"
"Best place for it."
I couldn't argue with that, so I didn't try. I put my hand in his.
He pulled me in close—one hand laced through mine, the other warm and flat against my lower back—and we swayed in the amber light of the barn while Maribel watched us from her stall with what I could only describe as quiet approval. The old floorboards creaked softly beneath our boots. Somewhere outside, the cicadas had started up.
