Chapter Nine

Now

“Mornin’,” Jake says with a tap of his hat, and I chastise the icy walls for thawing a bit at the sound of him snapping his whip over the horses in the corral, at the thunder of hooves pounding the dirt.

Nothing should make me feel pleasure anymore—not this scene lifted straight out of a postcard, not the Palominos’ and Pintos’ and Appaloosas’ manes dancing in the breeze, and especially not the view of the cowboy in the center of it all.

“Morning,” I say. I avoid his eyes and, instead, stare down at the black flip-flops standing on the second rung of chipped fence; my pedicure now looks as mangled as my mind. Jake’s “Yeehaw” noise is a concentrated version that hits the air with a punch, “Y-A-h!” and the horses immediately respond. After piling a mix of alfalfa and hay into the feeder, he saunters toward me.

“When are the guests arriving?” I ask.

He blinks. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

I don’t want to state the obvious. That unless he tells me something, I have no way of knowing it. Dad can’t talk and Anna doesn’t like me. Jake is it. He’s my lifeline. He must read that in my expression because his jaw loosens.

He leans his arms over the fence in a way only a cowboy can pull off and says, “Unless we can get this place into shape by next season’s start, we have to close the ranch for tourists.”

“What?” I’m shocked. Close the ranch?

“We’re closing the—”

“No. I heard you. I just can’t believe—The place doesn’t look that bad.”

Jake’s shrug is more like an I’m Too Polite to Argue With the Boss’s Daughter than an agreement. It doesn’t look great like it used to, but isn’t it fixable?

“Sure the fences need a little bit of mending and the road could use some improvements, but overall it looks pretty much the same as…”

Before.

You haven’t been here in years, Paige. You don’t know shit.

Jake’s head tilts away from me. All I see is the rim of his hat when I hear his question, “You see Anna up in the house?”

“Strawberry Apron Anna?”

He sticks a piece of straw in his mouth. It hangs out of the corner like an olden day movie star, which immediately reminds me of Ty and Bette Davis, and a rush of guilt and pain overwhelms me. “Well, Anna and I are it, as far as help goes.”

“What?” I’m remembering a scene from Butch Cassidy—Paul Newman sucking on straw like that. We used to watch that all the time, Dad and I. I wonder if he still has it. Maybe we can watch it later.

He looks up, still chewing. “Me and her…we’re it.”

I blink. Focus. “I can’t believe that. Dad used to have a huge amount of help here, full staff.”

He shrugs again.

“But when?”

This time he doesn’t look away. His eyes lock on mine. They’re the color of a blue, blue sky, cracking open and letting rain fall. “A couple years back.”

Another thing Mom didn’t tell me.

It was more than just my father’s deterioration. It was the ranch’s, too. All that’s left of his legacy, of our family’s legacy, is disappearing along with him.

“How much is left?” I hate to ask.

“Money wise? Not sure. Anna takes care of that end of things.”

Anna again.

I narrow my eyes. “What, exactly, is Anna’s relationship to my father?”

“You don’t know about Anna, either?”

That’s it.

My voice tumbles out like a growl. Like a scream, it roars up from my insides and suddenly my words are everywhere, filling this corral. “No, Jake. I don’t know about Anna. I didn’t even know my father was in a wheelchair, okay? My mom didn’t tell me a damn thing about it. I knew he had a terminal disease that was getting worse. My dad himself wrote me telling me not to bother visiting. He was too busy with appointments and ranch details and said that I should have a nice summer in Europe, blah blah. And in the end? It was all just bullshit. He’s dy…” I can’t say it. I groan away the lump and focus on what I can say. “And now his ranch is falling apart, too.”

Jake’s jaw tightens, but he rests his hand on my shoulder. I’m too upset to shy away from his touch. I let it ground me like his words, his voice. “I’m doing my best to stop that from happening.”

The morning sun is already noon-hot. It beats against his arms, exposed at the rolled-up sleeves. I dig my knuckle hard into my eye, in an effort to avoid sinking into them.

Do not look at him like that. Do not let him comfort you. They are dead. You are alive. You escaped for now. It doesn’t mean you deserve comfort.

I stare right into the punishing sun. “You know why I came here, Jake?”

Everything turns white.

“A bit.” Then, “Stop looking into the sun. You’ll go blind.”

I do as he says and turn away.

“What do you know?” I ask softly. Hoping it’s not a lot. Cringing, I wait in a pause so long, I open my eyes to see if he’s still there. My spotty peripheral vision sees his shadow spit the chewed-up straw onto the dirt. It crumbles under the heel of his boot until it’s just grit, reminding me of Elena’s ripped up rejection notice from Harvard that turned to a glue-y mess in her mother’s sink. Elena. The second. I haven’t thought of her since I left California.

“Enough,” he says.

Shit.

“Paige.” He says my name like, what? Like he wants to help?

He knows. If not about Ty, he knows something. He knows about the trains?

“I have to go,” I say, shakily. I can feel his eyes on my back as I run away. My hands are shaking so hard as I scurry up the ladder in the barn, and my words come out wobbly on the page. But I have to write it down.