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Chapter Seventeen
Ted sat on the front steps of the Annex, watching the gravel lot in front of the homestead. Paula lay at his feet, while Randy, Simon, and Ryan had taken up spots at the bottom of the steps. The sky looked like an old bruise, but he couldn’t enjoy it. Emma should’ve been back by now.
What he had to judge that by, he didn’t know. Last week, she’d returned to the ranch while it was still light. Tonight, he hadn’t seen her car or heard from her—and he’d called twice.
He would not allow himself to call again. He’d told her about Robert and William. He’d told Ginger too. And Nate. They’d counseled him to just wait and see what Emma would say when she got back.
He was starting to think she wasn’t coming back. She could literally be anywhere, and his foot started to bounce again. He hated this gnawing, anxious feeling in his chest, the way his stomach felt too heavy one moment and then like it had lost gravity the next.
The sun went completely down, and darkness draped over everything. Emma still hadn’t come back.
The front door opened behind him, and Nate said, “Teddy, you’ve got to come in.”
“I can’t,” he said.
Nate sighed as he sat on the hard cement with Ted. “This is so uncomfortable.” He nudged Paula, who just lifted her head and glared at Nate.
Yes, it was, but Ted couldn’t force himself to get up. Nate let the silence go on and on between them, and finally Ted said, “I started to fall for her.”
“I know.”
“I feel like an idiot.”
“I know.”
“She’s never going to tell me anything.”
“You don’t know that.”
Ted looked toward the faint yellow lights leaking out from between the slats in the blinds at the West Wing. “What if she doesn’t come back?”
“Ginger says she will. She says she’s been this late before.” Nate sat with him a while longer, and then he went in with the words, “Ten more minutes, Teddy. Then I’m dragging you back inside. You can’t do this to yourself.”
Ted nodded, and as soon as Nate closed the door, sealing Ted outside in the blackness alone, he set a timer for nine minutes. He wasn’t going to make his best friend come drag him inside. He wasn’t pathetic.
He just wanted to see Emma and make sure she was okay. Yes, he wanted to question her again. Maybe in person, he could get his earnest and genuine feelings across. Couldn’t she tell he just wanted to help her?
Why wouldn’t she let him help her?
Nine minutes later, his alarm buzzed, and Ted stood up. His backside and legs pricked with pins and needles, and he almost went down again. He steadied himself and whispered, “Please bring her home safely, Lord,” and went inside.
He slept fitfully, his window open so he could hear the noise if anyone should pull onto the gravel or close a car door. When he woke in the morning, he felt like he’d never truly settled to sleep, and he’d lost count of how many times he’d sat up to peer through the blinds when he’d thought he’d heard something.
He couldn’t stop himself from looking through the blinds first thing, but he didn’t see Emma’s car parked in the driveway.
She really hadn’t come back to the ranch.
Surly and with his mind swollen with worry, he dressed and got to work, skipping breakfast completely. He was on cleaning stalls that morning, and he moved Raindrop and Lucky Penny to the pasture. With several more horses out of their stalls and his four canine friends close by, Ted put on his gloves and picked up the shovel.
He could work, work, work to distract himself. He wished he had a pair of earbuds so he could play really loud music and drown out his thoughts. As it was, all he had to entertain him while he scooped sawdust and straw was his own circular thoughts about Emma.
He finished the stalls in record time and went to feed her babies. “Do you know where she is?” he asked Second Best. He could relate to the colt’s name, because Ted felt about two inches tall and invisible. He knew Emma had seen him when he’d come to the ranch, but it didn’t matter. She was so far into her own narrative that she couldn’t see the possibility of telling him the truth. Doing so would unravel so many of her other carefully crafted lies until her entire existence would collapse.
She’d have to admit that everything in her life was a fraud, and Ted didn’t know many people who would do that. He’d seen it before as a lawyer. It was easier to live inside the lies one told themselves. They made their own reality, and they would not deviate from it, even when presented with facts and direct evidence to the contrary.
That’s where Emma existed, and Ted was simply not enough of a pull to get her to come out and see a new way of being.
He sighed as Second Best cried for more milk, and bless his heart, Ted wanted to give it to him. So he did, despite Emma’s strong warnings not to feed the babies more than one bottle each morning and night. She was actually trying to wean them, and she would not approve of Ted giving in to Second Best.
