Page 77 of This Might Hurt
I glance at Andrew, who nods, then back at Walker’s green eyes.
They’re achingly tired and unsure. For the first time, he looks back at me with curiosity instead of frustration, like his soul is reaching out to touch mine.
That’s when I feel it. Not the bond of trusting us, or even liking us.
The bond I felt in that service station five years ago.
The way everything falls into place when a wave that has been travelling toward you your whole life finally arrives.
I take the brush from him. “Okay, but if she so much as looks at me, I’m gonna run away.”
He snorts, biting his lips hard to hide his smile. “Don’t do that.”
“Where should I brush her?”
He considers adorably, then points to an area near her hip. “I haven’t finished that part yet.”
We work on Stella for ages. She’s probably the best-groomed horse in Montana.
Andrew wants to show Walker how to braid her mane, but it turns out I’m the only one who knows how, thanks to Lena.
So I show both of them until Walker manages to pick it up.
He wants to braid her whole mane, but Sandra appears to tell him his foster mom is waiting out front to pick him up.
He makes Andrew promise to leave in the braids he’s already done so he can finish next Thursday.
My husband looks like his heart is getting ripped out of his chest as the kid walks away.
“How’d it go?” Sandra asks, brushing invisible horse-grime off her white blouse as she bustles back into the barn with Walker’s case file under her arm.
“I’ll give you guys some privacy to talk things over.
If you do want to move ahead to the next step, we can grab coffee and go over the best way to get you approved as soon as possible.
Then I’d have a conversation with Walker to see how he feels.
” Her smile warms. “He was just telling his foster mom about the guy he protected from getting bitten by a horse.”
I exchange a glance with Andrew. We have a beautiful home, settled lives, and my bipolar is well managed. There’s nothing else to be said that we didn’t talk through with our eyes over Walker’s head. “I think we’re ready for that coffee,” I tell her.
“He’ll have a whole family,” Andrew bursts out, like he can’t keep his mouth shut another second, “Jude’s grandma is moving up to Bozeman this fall, and his sister lives nearby. She has a social work degree, so she’ll know—”
Sandra shoots me a wry, understanding smile as Andrew spouts off random qualifications like this is a competition he needs to win to become this boy’s dad.
If it was, I think he’d hunt down the other contestants and bury them six feet under until there was no one left.
When I reach over and slip my fingers between his, he takes a deep breath and settles down long enough for Sandra to schedule us a meeting the next day.
“Let’s go visit the lord of the manor,” I suggest, swinging his hand in mine as we watch her drive away. “I haven’t seen him for a few weeks.”
I follow Andrew out the back of the barn.
It’s an incredible structure, designed by him with an architect to reflect the wood and stone of the valley around us.
It has all the state-of-the-art features he enjoyed in his family’s stables, but it’s always dusty and chaotic, full of life, and the horses are mostly round, sleepy trail ponies instead of pedigreed racers.
We pass through three or four gates to the most distant paddock, where a majestic black gelding is tearing up grass and flicking at flies with his tail.
As soon as he hears the gate click, he throws his head up and nickers at the sight of Andrew.
The way he comes cantering directly at us with his tail up never fails to scare me.
I hide behind Andrew’s shoulder as he coos and scratches Sid’s cheek, but the horse comes lunging around his master to find me and snuffle my ear.
“Okay, that’s enough, thank you.” Scrubbing the wet patch with my sleeve, I hop my ass up on the fence. “Do the hot thing again.”
Shaking his head with a smile, his face flushed a healthy pink from the brisk walk, Andrew boosts himself onto Sid’s bare back in the smooth, confident motion that never fails to turn me on.
Sid hops around a little, like he’s annoyed by this interruption of his grazing, but he calms down again as Andrew rubs his shoulders.
My husband sits back and gazes up at the sky for a long time, then glances at me with a soft grin, his eyes bright. “I love you so much, Jude Bishop.”
I stretch out my hand across the space between us.
His gold ring, the one that some people in love a hundred years ago passed down to us without ever knowing our names, glints in the sun as he drags his fingertips slowly down my palm.
We both make a fist, and tap our knuckles together the way I taught him a long time ago.
ANDREW
The first time I heard the word “legacy”, I was sitting on a rock in Scotland on a misty spring morning, watching Hugh Innes fish for trout.
The air was very quiet, no one else for miles.
I was only eight, and I wished we could go home because Colin told me the ghosts on the moors would carry me away.
“Do you know what a legacy is, boy?” my grandfather asked suddenly, the first time he had spoken to me since we started hiking at sunrise.
“No,” I admitted, pulling apart a bundle of peat moss.
“It’s what I’m going to give to you, and what you will give to your children someday.”
I searched my mind for what he could possibly mean. “Is it like money?”
He scoffed. “Money means nothing. A legacy is who and what you are in this world. The choices you make and the things you create that live on after you’re gone.”
I stuck the toe of my boot in the river, thinking about the sandwiches we brought that my grandfather seemed to have forgotten about eating. “So my legacy is made of the things I do?”
He paused and studied me from head to toe with a disappointed kind of look, then scoffed and turned away again. “No, Andrew. It’s the legacy of being an Innes. I built it, and you will pass it on.”
Sid shifts under me to reach another clump of grass, and I steady myself with a hand in his thick, coarse mane.
The sun is starting to go down behind the pines, glittering in the dust on his black coat.
In a minute, I’ll dismount and walk with Jude back to the barn.
I’ll help the staff clean up, while Jude works on a lesson plan in the front office with his fingers deep in his messy mop of hair and the pair of glasses he pretends he doesn’t need for reading.
We’ll go home and have sex, then lie around in bed eating pizza and sharing our secret lists of every way we want to love a kid who has never been chosen, whose worried green eyes and shy smile have overwritten the last of my lingering nightmares about Carrick House.
I’ll never make Walker sit on a rock and watch me fish, but I want to take him riding by the river someday.
We’ll eat as many peanut butter sandwiches as he wants, and go wading, and try to spot squirrels across the water.
He won’t be afraid of any ghosts. And if he asks me what it all means, I’ll tell him I don’t know.
That we love him, so very much, and it’s okay if that’s all he ever takes with him.