Once Cord took on a horse, he didn’t give up on the animal, period. He put in as many hours as necessary, met every challenge, no matter how difficult. He was all in, every time, and somehow the horse always came to understand that, some more quickly than others.

In the company of horses, Cord was his best self, the man he wanted to be, knew he should be, not just in the saddle or the corral or the round pen, but everywhere else, too.

It might sound crazy; obviously, women weren’t horses, and only so many parallels could be drawn, but Cord wanted that same level of do-or-die commitment—on his part and hers—when and if he married again.

He wanted to be that person as a lover and, eventually, as a husband and father. As a man.

All of which was fine in theory, but in this age of instant downloads and delete keys, it seemed to Cord that everything moved too quickly. People didn’t take the time to get to know each other, up close and personal; they evidently preferred digital relationships to the flesh-and-blood kind, racking up “friends” on their social media pages and mostly ignoring the people they saw every day of their lives.

It didn’t take a shrink to figure that one out. Real, face-to-face human beings could be troublesome. They needed time and attention. More than a chirpy text or a 140-character “tweet” or a post on some cyber wall.

Oh, yeah. Things got messy with the three-dimensional types.

Plenty of people seemed to prefer communicating from a comfortable distance. That way, you didn’t have to engage. But Cord believed you could still be generous. You could drive somebody to the hospital in the middle of the night—whether it was a male friend, an elderly person, a woman you were seeing. You could help people move, let them sleep on your couch when they needed a place to stay or give them a ride home when they’d had too much to drink.

Cord didn’t frequent social media sites; he had a PR firm to promote him and his training programs online. But he did a lot of business on both his phone and his laptop, often without talking to another living soul.

So maybe he didn’t have any right to criticize other people’s ways of interacting with their fellow mortals.

Jenna, for one, would’ve had a lot to say about his style of communication—and none of it would be good. Granted, she wasn’t the most objective person he knew, but she had a knack for calling bullshit.

A few minutes later, all these random thoughts stopped circling his brain like so many squawking crows, and he was left with the present dilemma. Carly.

Carly, who might—or might not—be his daughter.