After Being Kicked Out, I Became the Queen My Family Can't Reach novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Service Lane

Sent to the service lane at her old home, Calla walks the stallion up the front drive past her father, who does not know her; the groom who taught her does.

The gate hadn't changed.

Two white stone pillars, a brass plate that said REDMOND HILL, and a man in a green vest holding a clipboard.

I had left through that gate with two suitcases and my mother's crop.

Now I was riding in Jude Keller's truck, with a stallion thumping the trailer wall behind us and my hands wet in my lap.

Jude leaned out of the window and spoke to the man in the vest.

The man looked at his clipboard and pointed.

Not up the drive.

Left, along the fence, to a rutted track behind the manure yard.

Jude pulled onto the verge and turned to me.

"Service lane," he said.

"Mrs. Redmond's orders.

"Visiting riders from the smaller farms go around the back."

"Even the ones who have a card?"

"Even the ones who have a card."

His jaw was tight.

He looked, for the first time since I'd met him, angry on someone else's behalf.

"I can raise hell," he said.

"Don't."

"Rae."

"Let me do it my way."

I got out and walked to the back of the trailer.

Corsair knew me already.

He stood in the ramp's shadow with his ears pricked, and when I hummed, he came down the ramp.

I took the lead rope and turned him toward the white pillars, not the track.

"Miss," the gate man called, "you can't take him up the front."

"Then stop me," I said.

He didn't.

I think he looked at the stallion's shoulders, and at my face, and decided his clipboard wasn't paid enough for this.

I walked up the long gravel drive in broad daylight, with a black horse arching at my shoulder.

Guests were arriving for Cup week.

Trucks and long trailers lined the grass, and men in expensive boots stood talking on the lawn.

Heads turned as I went by, and somebody said, "Who's the girl?"

I kept my eyes forward.

At the top of the drive, the front steps rose to the wide white porch, and on the porch stood my stepmother.

Renata Redmond was fifty now, and she looked exactly as she had in the hall.

She wore a cream suit and carried a clipboard of her own.

The emerald sat on her left hand, bright as a drop of water.

Beside her stood a young woman in a tailored white riding jacket, long honey-blonde hair, a sharp chin.

Nicolette.

She had been fifteen when I left, a thin, mean girl who stole my hair ribbons and told her mother I had broken things.

She was twenty-four now, and she had grown into the meanness.

"That's the Keller stable hand," Nicolette said, quite loud.

"Mom, I told you they'd send a stable hand."

"I'm the rider," I said.

"Rae Linden."

I stopped at the bottom of the steps, and Corsair stopped with me.

Renata looked down from the porch.

I held out the rider card.

She came down three steps, took it, and read it.

Then she looked up at my face.

It was a long look.

Her eyes went across my hair, my jaw, the scar through my left eyebrow, and came back to my eyes, and stayed.

Nine years.

A different haircut, a different name, a rider's shoulders.

I made myself breathe the way you breathe near a nervous horse.

"Linden," she said.

"I don't know the name."

"It's a small barn."

"Saratoga."

"Not so small."

"They all start small."

Something moved behind her eyes and went away.

"You came up the front drive," she said.

"It was open."

Nicolette gave a short laugh.

"She's walking that animal over my mother's lawn," she said.

"Take him around, whoever you are.

"He'll ruin the grass."

"He's a thoroughbred," I said.

"Not a lawnmower."

A few of the nearer guests laughed.

Nicolette went pink.

Then the front door opened behind them, and my father came out onto the porch.

He wore a gray suit and a silver tie, and he moved slowly, the way big men do when they've been admired for thirty years.

He walked down the steps toward the lawn, and came level with me, three feet away.

I looked at him.

His silver hair was a little thinner, and his hands were the same heavy hands.

He looked at me, at Corsair, and at the card in his wife's fingers.

"Ma'am," he said, and touched two fingers to his forehead.

Then he walked on to greet a man with a trailer.

He had looked straight at me.

He had not known me.

Something small and hard closed in my chest, like a stall door.

"Take him to the north barn," Renata said, her voice flat, "Stall twelve.

"Abel will show you."

She went back up the steps.

As she climbed, she turned the emerald on her finger once.

I led Corsair across the yard.

The north barn smelled of hay and leather and liniment.

It hit me so hard that I had to stop with my hand on the door.

Down the long aisle, a man in a flat cap was forking straw into a stall.

He was thin and white-mustached, and bent in the shoulders in a way he had not been before.

He didn't look up.

I led Corsair to twelve and began to hum her three notes under my breath.

The fork stopped moving.

"That's a song with one owner," the old man said, without turning.

His voice shook.

"Hello, Callie."

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