Chapter 24: Dunning Place

The divorce decree came in March, in a long envelope, and I read it standing at the mailbox.

It gave me half of everything we had built together, in numbers I had balanced myself.

I paid both my lawyers in full, to the penny, on the first of April.

By June the ranch looked like a place where people lived.

On the first Saturday of the month, I stood at the gate before sunrise with a can of black paint and a brush.

The old sign had rotted off its posts years ago.

Jed had cut a new board from a cottonwood plank, planed it flat and left it on the porch without a word.

I laid it across two sawhorses by the gate.

I painted the letters slowly, one stroke at a time, in my own square hand.

DUNNING PLACE.

Under it, smaller: CLEAR CREEK.

Nothing else.

No LLC, no holding company, no parcel number.

I stepped back with paint on my wrists and read it out loud to the empty lane.

"Ours," I said, and then, because I was alone, "mine."

The truck came up behind me.

Jed climbed down without his hat, which was how I knew he was nervous.

He stood beside me and looked at the board for a long while.

"Your grandfather's would've been bigger," he said.

"Mine's legible."

"That too."

He reached into the truck bed and brought out a long iron, black from the fire, with a handle wrapped in rawhide.

At the end of it, welded in a neat circle, was a brand I had never seen.

An M and a J, sharing one stem.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Exiled Me to the Ranch of My Dreams from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.