“I am not!” Lila says in her tiny, garbled toddler voice. Like many kids her age, she practically speaks her own language, one that we all thankfully understand.
“You are sometimes,” Jenny mutters. “But Beau and Tomás are big boys. They can handle it.”
I glance over at my brother, who is panting slightly and looking more stressed out than he does when he’s foaling a mare. But I know he worries about Lila, and Jenny too. He just wants the little girl to stay safe, and there are plenty of things she could hurt herself on in the barn. He takes his babysitting duties very seriously.
“I’m not sure how you do it Jenny,” Tomás says.
“You just do it. You have to. And besides, it’s fun.” She shrugs and looks at her daughter with unguarded love and joy in her eyes. Lila is grabbing at things on my desk, and I calmly remove them from her hands as soon as she’s done investigating each one.
“Why don’t I take you down to the paddock to visit Bubba? We could bring him in and you could help me groom him, Lila,” Beau suggests.
“Yes! Yes! Mommy please? Please yes?” Lila asks, jumping up and down, her red curls flying everywhere.
“Of course,” Jenny says, giving my brother an inscrutable look. “I’ll get started on the payroll while you’re at it.”
The men and Lila leave, and for a few minutes, the office is filled with the sounds of Jenny and I filing papers and typing on our laptops.
“So,” she says. “You and Nathan?”
“Maybe. It was just a kiss,” I say, lying once again.
“So you don’t hate him so much anymore?”
“He still pisses me off, which is good because it means I won’t catch feelings for him and be upset when he leaves or it doesn’t work out. He’s safe.”
But the words sound like a lie, and I nearly choke on their sharp, traitorous edges.
Nothing about Nathan Booth is safe.
After Jenny leavesto feed Lila dinner, I sit in the barn office and think.
I take off Gramps’s hat and place it on the desk in front of me. More than anything in the world, I wish he was still here, so I could ask him for advice. Grammy, too. She would know exactly what to do.
“I can’t believe I let him wear your hat,” I say out loud. “I have no idea what I’m doing. With any of it. Nathan, the barn, my life.”
I close my eyes and try my hardest to imagine what he’d say to me, what wonderful, wise advice he’d give me, but nothing I think of comes close to the way he was able to instantly make anything feel better. Sometimes, even just sitting in silencetogether while we polished tack or groomed the horses was enough. I’d enter the barn upset about something at school—a boy, or a mean girl in one of my classes, or my math test—and I’d leave feeling like he set me right.
And if Gramps couldn’t fix it, Grammy could. With her sure hands and her warm hugs and her way of understanding everything.
A tear rolls down my cheek as I try, but fail, to recapture the feeling of being with them. They’re gone. That thought swallows me, over and over again, consuming me in waves. Normally, I avoid feeling like this by focusing on work. And I have so much of it to do that it’s an ever-present crutch. I go to bed every night too exhausted to feel sad.
But deep down, I am crushingly, overwhelmingly sad. All the time.
For myself, for Beau, for our parents and our grandparents. For our family. We’ve all endured so much. My grandparents could have collapsed when they lost their daughter and son-in-law but they didn’t. They raised me and Beau instead, pushing down their own grief to put our needs first.
And my brother—my brother is the strongest person I know. Shouldering and weathering the loss of two sets of parents with stoicism and a level head.
Another tear falls and I don’t bother wiping it away. No one else is here to see me, and letting myself cry for once feels good. Then, a knock sounds at the door, and I hastily wipe the tears away. I bet it’s Tomás with a question about one of the horses.
“Come in,” I call out.
To my surprise, it’s Nathan. He looks weary and pretty much like I’m feeling right now. His usual smile is gone, and his eyes have lost their spark.
“Hey,” he says. “I wanted to talk, if you have a moment.”
“Sure.” I pray that my eyes don’t look too red.
Nathan sits across from me, and as soon as he looks at me, he immediately frowns. “What’s wrong?”
