Page 31 of Bones and Ashes

I know the mechanics of a correct position. I know the geometry of a dressage arena, the distances between fences, the feel of a horse's mouth through the rein when the connection is right and soft and the whole thing hums like a conversation only the two of you can hear.

But the problem is this.

All the kids around here already know how to ride. They've been ridin' since they could grip a saddle horn, and they don't do it in an English saddle with a crop, and polished field boots, and a velvet-covered helmet.

They do it in worn western tack with split reins and dusty Wranglers. And they learn by doin', not by being told where to put their heels.

If they're takin' dressage, it's western dressage—which is a whole different language, a whole different philosophy of contact and carriage that I was never schooled in.

The girls out here are runnin' barrels at speed, leaning so far into the turn their hair sweeps the dirt, and the boys are ropin' calves with a precision that makes my years of competitive equitation look like a parlor trick performed for judges in tweed.

And I can't do either of those things.

Not even a little.

Not even badly.

So lessons are out.

I can't train horses. Not like Cash, who gentles a green colt with the patience of a man who has never once questioned whether the land beneath him is his to stand on. He doesn't think about it. He just does it—reads the animal, adjusts, moves with it, and the horse follows because Cash carries a certainty in his body that animals recognize before people do.

It's inheritance made physical, and I don't have it.

Not that kind.

I have the kind that photographs well and holds a two-point over a three-foot oxer at a collected canter, and out here, in Drybone, that particular inheritance is worth exactly nothing.

Hell, Wyatt could probably train horses better than me.

Wyatt, who wouldn't know a correct lead change from a costume change—even he grew up in this dirt, absorbin' the rhythms of western horsemanship through proximity and repetition the way I absorbed camera angles and caption length.

He'd at least know where to start.

He'd at least speak the language, even if he did butcher the grammar.

And this is when it hits me.

The thought that's been circlin' my brain for weeks, maybe months, maybe since I drove back through the gate after college with my trailer hitched behind me.

The thought finally stops orbiting and lands.

It is possible that I do not belong here.

Not temporarily. Not in the way a person doesn't belong at a party they showed up to overdressed—where you adjust, you recalibrate, you find the right corner and make it yours.

No. I mean structurally.

Eleanor made sure of that.

She pointed me at the camera and the camera pointed me at the world, and the world pointed me at Emory & Henry, and Emory & Henry pointed me at arenas with white fences and footing, and all of it—every single mile of it—pointed me away from here.

Which allows another uncomfortable thought to land as well.

I was being groomed for Marcus.

For marriage.

For children who would continue a dynasty.