Page 69 of Wild Then Wed
Anna seems to get it—whatever’s sitting heavy in the silence between us.
“I should probably head home,” she says gently. “Eat something before the whole puking thing comes back.”
I nod. “Good plan.”
She hesitates like she might say something else, but instead just gives me that soft, grateful smile again. “Thanks, Wren. For listening.”
“Anytime.”
She grabs her bag from the bench and walks off. I wait until I hear her car start before I head toward mine.
The yellow paint of my Bug is dulled with dust and sun. I slide behind the wheel and sit there for a second before starting the engine. The heater kicks on, wheezing warm air against my knees. The radio stays off.
The road home is mostly empty. Flat stretches of frost-covered fence line, the sky above already shifting to that deep late-afternoon blue that feels like winter—even if the calendar says it’s still fall.
I keep my hands on the wheel, steady.
Seeing pregnant women used to wreck me.
I’d see them in the grocery store, or at the feed supply, or at town events with their hands resting over round bellies and I’d feel like someone had reached into my chest and taken something I wasn’t done hoping for.
It doesn’t hit me that way anymore. Not exactly. The sharp edge of it has dulled over the years, but there’s still a sting. Still that quiet ache of knowing I’ll never be the woman who feels akick from the inside or buys a car seat or hears someone call me Mom.
Which is why my training program matters, because if I can’t have a child of my own, I need something that feels like a legacy. Something I can build. Something I can pour into.
And this—these horses, this land, the kids who come here to learn—this has been that for me.
I started my training program a year after my surgery. Mostly because I couldn’t keep walking around the ranch with nothing but pain in my hands and chest. I needed to make something useful. I needed to prove—to myself more than anyone—that I still had something to give.
My dad saw it before I did. He was always the one who could name something in me before I had the words for it—especially when it came to horses. He used to say they listened to me because I didn’t make noise just to hear myself talk. That I moved slow and spoke quieter than most people ever bother to.
When everything happened—when I lost the one future I thought I’d have—he didn’t try to fix it. He didn’t say anything at all for a while. Just watched me. Gave me space. Let me find my footing again in the barn, where it was quieter, steadier. Where the rules still made sense.
And then one day, out of nowhere, he said I should start something of my own. That I had a gift. That there were horses out there who needed what I could give, and kids who needed someone like me to teach them how to listen.
So I did.Wedid, my dad and I.
We cleared out one of the old barns and converted it into a proper facility. We built out the round pen, mapped out a rotation schedule, printed flyers and fielded phone calls. At first, it was just a few horses—some green, some anxious, a couple with buckshot trauma in their eyes—and one teenage girl whoseparents thought learning groundwork might help her with her anxiety.
Now it’s a full program. One of the best in the state, if you go by word of mouth and the waitlists and the owners who fly in for consults and send thank-you notes three years later.
I work mostly with performance horses—race-horses, barrel horses, anything high-energy with something to prove and something to unlearn. I don’t break them. I don’t believe in that. I get them to listen. I get them to trust. I get them to come back to themselves so they can do what they were born to do without fear getting in the way.
Some days I’m in the saddle, some days I’m in the dirt. I teach groundwork and balance and pressure. I teach kids, too. I teach them to stand their ground and mean it. I teach them to read the room and the horse and themselves.
It’s hard work. Dusty. Unforgiving. But it’s mine.
And if I can’t raise a child, then I’ll raise this—this program, this place, this rhythm of early mornings and sore legs and the quiet satisfaction of watching a skittish colt settle under your hands.
It’s not the life I planned. But it’s one I built.
And that matters, too.
I wonder if Sawyer ever thought about kids. Not with me—obviously—but in thebeforeversion of his life.
I don’t know him well enough to be thinking about this. But then again, we’re getting married, so maybe that line’s already blurred.
Something about him makes me think he’d be good at the whole parenting thing. Not in a let’s-play-catch-and-go-camping kind of way. In a real way. The kind that shows up early and stays late. The kind who buys vegan hot chocolate just because he realizes you go through your water too fast and it’s cold out. The kind who hands it to you without needing any of the credit.
