Page 30 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

I grip my camera strap so hard my fingers ache.

This is stupid. It’s one memory card.

One.

Except it isn’t.

Because the truth is I’ve spent years making my life portable. Temp jobs. Short contracts. New towns. New rooms. New roads.

Always an exit strategy. Always a bag half-packed in my head even when the dresser drawers say otherwise.

People think that means I’m brave or independent or adventurous.

Sometimes it means I’m running before anything can root hard enough to hurt.

The photos are part of how I cheat that.

Proof that the last place existed. Proof that I existed in it. Proof that not every goodbye erased what came before. And family…

Family is a generous word for what I’ve got.

My mother likes control dressed up as concern. My father perfected emotional absence into an art form somewhere around the time I learned to stop expecting him to show up fully.

Evan is the only one who ever feels easy, and even he’s the kind of easy that arrives with drama tucked under one arm and an apology half-written in his pocket.

But I love them anyway.

Which is humiliatingly on brand for me.

I have photos of Evan asleep on my old couch with his boots still on because he drove four hours to see me after one breakup and pretended it was casual.

I have one of my mother laughing at something off-camera when she didn’t know I was there with the lens.

I have one of my father with his hand on my shoulder at a marina when I was twenty-three, both of us looking sunburned and awkward and almost, almost like people who might figure it out.

Maybe nobody else would understand why those things matter.

Maybe nobody else would understand why losing them feels like someone reached into my chest and put a hand around something soft just to see if it would bruise.

The barn blurs.

I blink hard.

Absolutely not.

I’m not crying in a giant barn before noon on a Monday because life decided to mug me via digital storage.

“Annie?”

I jerk at the sound of my name.

Duke stands a few yards away in the open aisle between stalls, a metal Thermos in one hand and a look on his face I don’t have the energy to decode.

He’s in a dark henley with the sleeves pushed up, jeans dusty at the knees, brown hair more unruly than usual, like he’s been running his hands through it.

He must’ve come in quietly, which feels unfair. A man his size should creak a little for the sake of preparedness.

“You okay?”