not what I called about anyway. I need to tell you something.” Damn, this was the hardest phone conversation she’d ever had. “I lost my job.”
“Oh, Sarah.”
“It’ll be okay,” Sarah said. “You’ve got Mike now. He’s still working, right? So you and Katie’ll be okay?”
“We’ll be fine. But it’s not all about me, you know.” She muttered something Sarah could barely hear. It sounded like “it never was.”
“What did you say?”
“I said it never was.” Kelsey sounded defiant, as though she was letting loose something she’d kept bottled up a long time. “It was never about me. It was about you, needing to be—I don’t know. Needing to be needed.”
Sarah didn’t know how to respond.
“Sorry,” Kelsey added. “But that’s what Mike said. Look, I’m grateful,” Kelsey sounded sullen, “but if you hadn’t always been there taking over, I might have listened to his message. I know you were trying to help, but…”
“Kelsey, he left you and you collapsed. What the hell were all those headaches about?”
“They were about being stressed,” Kelsey admitted. “You helped, and I appreciate it. But I’m okay now, all right? I don’t need help. I can make it on my own.” She paused a moment. “With Mike. I know you think it’s wrong to take him back, but the whole thing was mostly a misunderstanding.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. The phone suddenly seemed heavy in her hand.
“What we need to talk about is you,” Kelsey said. “I can’t believe you’re still harping on the whole deal with Flash. Come on, what’s done is done. I’d forgotten all about whoever bought him. I remember you made him into some kind of bogeyman, some evil outside force that ruined our lives. Well, he didn’t.”
“We lost the ranch, Kelsey.”
“We lost it because Roy made bad decisions. He gambled on that horse, and he lost. There was something wrong with Flash, you know? I was scared to death of him.”
“I loved him.”
“I know you did, but he was screwed up. Nobody could deal with him. So stop blaming everything on somebody who took a load off our hands.”
Sarah felt like the air had been sucked out of the car. Her sister blamed Roy for what had happened to them. Roy, who had saved their family and died. Died for her, in a way.
“Look, I have to go.” She had no idea where. She wasn’t about to ask Kelsey for a place to stay anymore.
She pulled the phone away from her ear and heard her sister protesting in a tinny, faraway voice. “No, wait. Sarah, we need to talk about this.”
“I’m fine.”
“No you’re not. Jeez, Sarah, let it go. What are you hanging onto all this stuff for? You have to forgive him.” Her tone softened. “You have to forgive yourself. What happened with Flash didn’t ruin our lives. It was just the way things went, okay? It wasn’t your fault.”
“Sure.” Sarah tried to sound casual. “I know that.”
Kelsey sighed. “So what did you call about?”
“Nothing,” Sarah said. “Just letting you know where I am.”
“Which is where?”
Sarah looked out the window at the acres of sagebrush stretching from the car, the faint blue mountains in the distance. “The Carrigan Ranch,” she said. “Or the LT, or whatever. I think I might stay here a while.”
She clicked the phone shut and eased down the road to the ranch, nursing the Malibu over the ruts and ridges. Going slow wasn’t such a bad thing anyway; it gave her time to think.
By the time she reached the ranch, she’d thought, all right. She’d managed to wipe everything Kelsey said out of her mind and focus on the horse ahead of her. Horses had always been like that for her. When you worked with a horse, it was you and the animal. The rest of the world faded away.
Today, that would be a good thing. She shut off the engine and stepped out of the car, breathing in the scent of old wood, hay, and sunshine as she stared out at the complex network of corrals.
Which were empty.
Not only was there no red dun stallion, there were no horses at all.
She strode into the barn and was greeted with a chorus of impatient whinnies. The graceful heads of a dozen quarter horses hung over stall doors at regular intervals down the long wood alleyway, their soft eyes gazing expectantly at her. There was a dull thud as one of the more impatient critters kicked at his stall door.
“Hey, babies, what’s wrong? Didn’t anybody let you out?” She