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I shrug, the rawness in my chest burning for the unrelenting need of her. “Tired of being dicked around.”

“Dicked around?” Barron smiles stands before me, his arms crossed over his chest, watching me try to work one-armed. I still have months before I should be back at work, but when you’re forced to work for a living, you make sacrifices. “Tell me the truth.”

I drop the wrench in my hand for the third fucking time in the ten minutes I’ve been holding it. “I don’t know what it is you want to hear.”

“That you let her go because of me.”

He’s not wrong. My heart’s in my fucking throat. I don’t say anything. I’m not sure words are necessary.

“Why are you acting like this?” he presses, demanding an answer.

“Someone had to learn from your mistakes,” I snap and pick up the wrench.

Disappointment forces him to shift his stance. He blinks at me and I’m not sure if he’s caught off guard by me or just thinking about kicking my ass, which wouldn’t be hard in my one-armed condition. “Sometimes I wonder why we’re fucking friends.”

Groaning, I draw in a deep breath. “I’m sorry, okay?” I shrug and think back to the night I let her out of my truck and into the arms of others. “I didn’t want her to end up like Tara.”

“She wouldn’t have,” he points out. “They were completely different.”

I work my jaw back and forth, thinking of picking up the wrench but decide it’s not worth it. “I got Abbi pregnant when we were seventeen.” I don’t give away the ending, because it ended before it began, but it takes Barron by surprise.

He nods, picks up the wrench and hands it to me. “Is that why you let her go?”

I stare at the concrete and the dusting of hay from the diet feeder to the left of my stall. Same one that tried to rip my arm off. It’s like it’s in here taunting me. “Among other reasons.”

Barron shoves his hands into his jeans. “Jace, don’t make the same mistakes I have. If you love her, don’t let her marry him.”

If I love her? When has love ever been part of logic?

I drop the wrench again. Kicking it under the tractor in my stall, I make my way into the office. Lillian’s in there with Kacy and the girls.

While they’re busy, I walk up to Lillian’s desk. “Did you get the parts in for the Calder Ranch? They have two balers that aren’t serviceable now and getting bitchy about it.”

Without looking up from her phone, Lillian hands me a parts order. I glance at it. Backordered as usual. “Fuck.”

She lifts her shoulders in a shrug. “We should start a club.”

“For what?”

She looks up at me, winking. “Us.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Us?”

“Yeah. Theotherpeople.”

I know what she’s talking about. Me and Abbi. Her and Morgan. “I won’t join,” I tell her, being honest. “I don’t like clubs. I couldn’t even stay in boy scouts.”

Lillian looks around the office and then her voice softens as though we’re discussing who we’re going to murder later. “Have you talked to her?”

“You mean after I asked her not to go back to him and she did? No.”

“You did not ask her that,” she mocks, knowing me all too well.

“Not in so many words.”

“So?”

I groan, annoyed everybody is in my business today. “So what? She’s with him.”