Chapter 17: What It Costs

Jesse sold his horse on Thursday morning, and I didn't know until the trailer was backing up to my corral.

I had been awake since four with Kit's last words going around my head.

Say it in front of Lorna.

Ward was afraid of his own wife, and I had no idea why, or how to put her in a room with him.

I was carrying a bucket of oats out of the feed room, still turning it over, when I heard the hitch clank.

A neighbor from the next ranch over was standing by his rig with his hat pushed back.

Jesse stood in front of the trailer, holding a bay gelding by the halter.

It was Cutter, the horse he had ridden for eleven years.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Fifty-two hundred." He didn't turn around. "He's worth more, but he's paying cash today."

"Jesse."

"I need it by noon."

The neighbor looked at me, then at the ground, and then took the lead rope very gently.

Cutter walked up the ramp without a fuss.

That was the worst part.

He trusted the hand that was handing him over.

Jesse's shoulders didn't move until the gate was latched.

Then he took the check in both hands and put it in his shirt pocket, and he watched the trailer all the way down my lane.

"Your truck's in the shed," I said. "The old Dodge."

"I sold that last night. To his cousin. Sixty-eight hundred."

"You didn't ask me."

"It was mine."

I put the bucket down.

"What is it for?"

"Come in the house," he said. "Kit's waiting."

Kit was sitting at my kitchen table with Lottie in a high chair that had been my grandmother's.

She had a stack of envelopes in front of her, bills mostly, the pink ones, with red stamps.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Let Them Think She Was His from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.