Ms. Calculation

She turned slightly to face him, but she didn’t greet him with a smile. “Long enough to know that you slept in.”

He glanced down at his phone. It was 8:00 a.m. Most ranchers were up at five in order to get the daily chores taken care of. When he’d been working on the ranch in high school he’d followed that schedule, but now that he was on his own, he rarely forced himself to get out of bed that early. Yet Gwen undoubtedly still thought he was the kid he had once been—what would he have to do to prove that he’d changed?

“Long night,” he said, but the moment he said it, he wished he hadn’t brought it up. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about why and who had kept him awake—or the guilt he felt about his action with Carla. Nothing good would come of bringing up the events of yesterday.

Gwen lifted her chin, but thankfully didn’t say anything.

Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it either.

He was tempted to apologize, but he couldn’t say he was sorry for doing what had to be done, and he didn’t want to start a fight, so he just kept his mouth shut. He clicked the door shut behind him and made his way out to her. He leaned against the fence beside her.

She smelled like a fresh shower and the sweet fragrance of roses. It was the same shampoo she had been using since they were young, and the smell made him remember the nights they had spent making out in the bed of his truck. He’d loved those nights under the stars, flirting with the boundaries of their relationship. His fingers twitched as he recalled running them up the soft skin of her belly, his touch only to be trailed with his languishing, hungry kiss. He’d wanted to make love to her so badly.

He moved, readjusting his body, which was responding to his memories. That was all they were—memories. They were as the seasons, the heat of summer all too soon replaced by the chill of the fall.

She stepped away from him, reached down and scooped a bit of the snow together, balling it. She laughed as she pitched it at him. Most of it disintegrated in the air before a tiny bit splattered on his jacket.

“Hey, now, what was that?” he asked with a laugh. He reached down and made a snowball and gently lofted it toward her.

She ducked with a laugh and it breezed past her. “Missed me,” she teased, sticking her tongue out at him.

It reminded him of when they were younger, full of life and joy. It was as if they were innocent again, and it made him long for what they had once been.

She wiped the bits of snow off her hands. “I stopped by hoping you would show me where you found Bianca.” Her voice was tinged with sadness, and it made him wish she would just go back to throwing snowballs.

He glanced in the direction of the main house that, from where they were standing, was completely out of view thanks to a large stand of cottonwoods. The barns were behind the house, but he could have drawn them in complete detail from memory, down to the tiny carving in the hayloft of W+G 4Ever he’d cut into the soft wood when they were kids.

“There’s nothing there. It wasn’t much of a crime scene.”

“You didn’t think it was a murder either, remember?”

Ouch. He thought about arguing with her about what exactly he was and wasn’t allowed to do with his investigations, and what he’d been presented with on scene, but he bit his tongue. Apparently she was still in the anger stage of her grief. Next came depression, at least for most people, but knowing Gwen as well as he did, he doubted that she would let him see her like that again.

He rubbed his fingers together as he recalled brushing her tears from her cheeks when she’d collapsed on the floor. It probably wasn’t normal for him to feel this way, but he appreciated that moment of weakness when he’d told her about Bianca’s death. For once, he’d gotten a real reaction—a response not muted by her strength or her desire to veil the truth. Getting to have the real her was another thing he missed about their dating.

It was a rare thing in this world to know the essence of a person—especially in a small town where everyone feared the jaw-jacking of the neighbors. Any little thing could be a full-blown phone-tree emergency. It was like living in a game of telephone. What may have started out as something innocent enough would be a prison-worthy offense in under twenty-four hours—and that fear kept everything muted, even emotions.

It was maybe the thing he hated the most about living in a small town.

He pushed off the fence and walked toward his patrol unit. Gwen had parked her father’s old beat-up Ford in front of his one-car garage.

She followed close behind him. “Are you going to take me over there? Or do I just need to go and figure it out?”

Yep, definitely still in the anger phase.

“In the car,” he said, answering her with the same level of shortness.

It wasn’t really a distance worth driving, but he immersed himself in the silence between them—letting it remind him of exactly all the reasons he should cap any of his nostalgic feelings for the girl he’d once known. The Gwen beside him, while she had many of the old habits he had once loved her for, was not the same.

He would give almost anything to see that smile he’d fallen in love with, the one he’d caught a glimpse of when she pitched the snowball at him. He’d always remember that girl.

He parked in front of the stables. A little girl was standing by the front door; her hands were red from the cold but she still had her thumb planted in her mouth. He smiled as he got out of the car and gave an acknowledging nod to his former sister-in-law Alli Fitzgerald’s daughter. He’d never really cared for Alli—especially after she had cheated on Waylon—but he’d always had a soft spot for her daughter and was glad that she had chosen to raise her child on the ranch.

The little munchkin, Winnie, had curly brown hair and a smile complete with all of her baby teeth in their gapped and crooked glory. And when she smiled at him, everyone on the entire ranch knew that he was mush. Whatever the girl wanted...it was hers.

He walked around to open the door for Gwen.

“How’s it goin’, Win?” he asked, sending the little girl a playful grin.

The two-year-old bounded over to him, throwing her arms around his knees. “Wy-ant!” she cried, saying his name with two distinct syllables. “You bring candy?”

He reached into the breast pocket of his uniform where he always carried fun-sized banana taffies for Winnie. “Oh, no,” he teased. “I’m all out!”

Her plump cheeks fell and her smile disappeared as she looked up at him. “Wy-ant... Don’t tease da poor girl,” she said it with all seriousness, but he couldn’t help but laugh as her high-pitched voice mimicked her mother’s words.

“Oh, well, if you say so.” He pulled the candy from his pocket and handed it to Winnie, who took it and ran toward the barn and out of the vicinity of anywhere her mother might see her gobble the treat.

Winnie turned back as she moved to slip through the barn door. “Thank you, Wy-ant.”

Gwen stood next to him. “Looks like you have a fan.”

He looked at her and smiled. “She is something special,” he said, wanting to add that the girl wasn’t the only special one in his life, but he stopped.

Gwen looked at him and moved to speak, but stopped and then walked to the barn where Winnie had disappeared. “Where did it happen?”

He motioned forward, opened the door for her and followed her inside. The lights were on, illuminating the darkened stalls. It was quiet since the horses had already been fed and turned out for the day. The place smelled like hay and horses, a smell that always reminded him of home.

“We found her in the back pen, just there,” he said, motioning to the stall.

Gwen stood still, staring in the direction he had pointed. Aside from it being the place where they’d found Bianca’s body, it was like every other barn—stacks of hay, the tack room, stalls and a door leading to the pasture. Yet Gwen was holding her arm around her body like this was the first time they’d ever been inside, even though there was evidence in the hayloft to the contrary.

Her gaze moved to the ladder that led up to the hayloft, and for a moment, he swore he saw a smile flicker over her lips. Was she thinking about the last time they had stepped up those rungs as well?

He walked around her, hoping she was envisioning all the possibilities of giving him one more shot in the hayloft. Moving to the stall, he looked to the spot where they had found Bianca. For a moment, he could see her there again. At the time, there had been talk about calling her family in, but he was glad now, looking back, that they hadn’t. Some things couldn’t be unseen. It would be hard enough for Gwen to see Bianca in the casket—the last thing she needed was to see her sister sitting in the middle of the horse stall surrounded by dirty hay, water buckets and the hooves of a hurt and scared mare.

The horse was gone and the stall had been recently cleaned so well that he could smell the strong, suspicious scent of bleach. That was unlike his mother or the staff—normally they never used bleach out here. Some things weren’t going to get completely clean no matter how much scrubbing they did, and a horse stall was one of them.

“What happened to the horse—is she okay?” Gwen asked.

The wood of the door was rounded and smoothed by the years of horses chewing it, but as he took his hand away it still scraped at his skin.

“My mother had another vet come in and take a look at her. Luckily, the horse’s leg wasn’t broken, just a sprain.”

“I’m glad the horse is going to be okay.” She said it like it carried some measure of comfort that only one of the beings in this stall had lost its life. “Bianca would have liked to have known the horse was okay, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure she’s watching down.” As he spoke, he knew it was a platitude.

Gwen glanced over at him and put her hand on top of his. “Thanks. I know you don’t mean it, but thanks.”