“Check in, we’re clear here, out.”
“I’m good,” Nicole chimed in.
“Safe here,” Leia held the button down and talked before she released it.
“I just went up and the sky is clear,” Grunt told us. “Safe to come out. I have nine horses in my backyard that belong to you guys.”
Lexi’s hand went over her mouth in relief that the horses were there together.
I took the radio from Leia and asked Grunt, “Are any of them injured, over.”
“Fuck if I know!” Grunt said from the radio. “There’s a goddamn turkey that tried to bite me, I can tell you that.”
The four of us laughed, in relief and at Grunt’s angry words, and Sierra hugged the girls close to her sides before she got up and put her arms around me.
“Can we move somewhere that doesn’t have tornados?” she asked me with a laugh.
“Well, our other options are blizzards, hurricanes, or earthquakes. I’ll take the occasional severe weather over any of those,” I kissed her on the top of her head and then pulled away to go up the ladder and open the hatch.
Once I had it pushed open, I poked my head out of our shelter and saw that the sun was shining brightly and there wasn’t a cloud as far as I could see.
“Well,” I said as I stepped out and then reached down to help Sierra and the girls. ‘What do you say we eat our sandwiches while we walk our asses to Grunt and Shannons and retrieve our horses?”
“I’ll get the ropes,” Leia sighed, having done this with me more than once in her lifetime. “Will you help me, Lexi?”
Lexi followed her down the middle of the barn toward the tack room. I walked out of the barn to look around and saw that we hadn’t even really had that much rain. The blanket was over in the flowerbed, but it wasn’t gone, so I guessed that even the wind hadn’t been bad enough to damage the roof of the house.
“This is very anticlimactic,” Sierra said as she looked around. “And, for the record, I am perfectly fucking okay with that.”
16.
SIERRA
“We got another letter in the mail yesterday and this one came with a package.”
“That bitch just doesn’t learn, does she?” I could tell that Marcus was irritated just by the tone of his voice coming through the phone. “Can you bring it by the office when you get off work?”
“Yes, I’ll drop it by. I’m off today, but have a few errands to run, so I’ll come by when I’m finished. I’ve got some of Holly’s clothes she left at the house last weekend, too.”
“Is it a purple shirt?” Marcus growled. “Because she’s torn the fucking house up looking for some purple shirt that she just has to have.”
“Yup. It’s purple,” I laughed. “I’ll bring it in with me this afternoon. I finally relaxed and started letting the girls stay home alone for short stints, so I don’t have them with me. Shannon is going to drop them at the house when she picks all the kids up from summer camp.”
“Reagan told me that you and him talked about that at practice. I’m on the fence about it.”
“Rowdy doesn’t think she’ll do anything. It’s been three months since she got out and she’s only sent letters. As far as we can tell, she’s never even left Lubbock.”
“Well, if the two of you are okay with it, then I’m sure it’s fine. I’m just not quite as trusting as your husband.”
“Yeah, I’m not totally okay with it, but we can’t live in fear forever.”
“Yeah, you can,” Marcus laughed. “Okay, I’ll see you at the office.”
We said our goodbyes and I dropped my phone into my purse before I walked up the sidewalk to Willow’s salon.
Three hours later, all caught up on gossip with my hair freshly cut and styled, I walked into Marcus’s office and was greeted by his assistant. I left the clothes and mail with her since Marcus was visiting with a client and then headed home to make sure my girls were okay since, once again, they had forgotten to call me and let me know they’d made it home safe. Since they weren’t answering the phone, I assumed that the two of them were out playing with the horses rather than getting the chores done off the list I had left on the bar.
As I drove, I worried about the girls being alone in the barn. Just yesterday, a man had dropped off a rescue horse for Rowdy to look after. The horse was very high strung and not good around people after years of abuse. Rowdy wasn’t sure that he would be able to save her, and had worried last night that she was too far gone for him to help her at all.
She had bucked and kicked inside the trailer, hurting herself over and over, until Nicole was able to sedate her enough so that she would walk with Rowdy into one of the stalls in the barn.
Early this morning, the drugs had worn off and the horse had started screaming and kicking at the walls of her stall. Rowdy had quickly gotten up and thrown on his clothes and boots so he could check on her and I had followed him outside.
He talked to her from the other side of the stall door, his voice calm and even, until she had finally worn herself out, foaming with sweat from her exertions. When Rowdy saw that she was calm, he reached through the bars to try and touch her and she turned so that she could kick back at him to get him to move away.
“I just don’t know,” Rowdy had worried as he watched her start to calm again. “If I can’t even get near her, I won’t be able to doctor her wounds or clean her stall. This may be too much for me to handle. She might have turned a corner in her mind
