Aside from the dirt driveway, the yard is comprised entirely of green grass. Fields filled with neat rows of corn, wheat, and other crops I can’t identify surround us in every direction, as far as the eye can see.

“Are you always this early of a riser?” Ellen asks as we walk along.

“I am,” I reply. “I used to fight it when I was younger, but now I’ve learned to appreciate having some time to myself before most of the world wakes up. I usually go running first thing.”

Ellen lets out a low laugh. “Jace mentioned he’s been running every morning. Extra runs make a lot more sense now.” She gives me a conspiratorial wink.

“Extra runs?” I ask.

“Even on the mornings he already has team ones.”

“Oh,” I reply, feeling silly. When Jace tells me he’s heading to practice, I always imagine him standing around doing something similar to the simple drills he coached me through, not running. I think of the many mornings I pushed my stamina to its limits in hopes of avoiding or impressing him, and resolve to set an easier pace on our next run.

We walk across packed dirt, passing another truck and a silver SUV. A massive red barn sits before us, with two silver silos towering directly behind it.

One half of the barn is painted a darker shade of red, as though someone added a new coat more recently and then left the other half. I don’t ask if that’s the case, because I feel some strange compulsion to ensure the woman beside me has a positive impression of me.

Ellen pulls open the massive barn door. It groans as it slides along the track, revealing a couple of tractors parked in the center aisle. The first one has wheels roughly the same height as me.

A low whinny sounds to my left, and I look over to see a chestnut horse peering over a stall door. It nickers softly as Ellen walks over, nudging her pockets in a quest for food. She laughs and pats its large head before opening a plastic bin and scooping out a generous serving of grain that she pours into a bucket and feeds to the hungry horse. She fills two more buckets, then walks farther into the barn. I follow her around the corner, where two more horses are eagerly awaiting their breakfast. One is a paint, the other entirely black.

Ellen offers me one of the buckets.

“Want to feed Patches?” she asks, nodding to the paint.

I take the bucket from her. “Creative name,” I joke.

Ellen laughs. “We let Claire pick out their names. This is Black Beauty”—she nods to the black horse—“and the first one you met was Firewood.”

“What do you use them for?”

“They do some of the plowing in the smaller fields that are tough to navigate in the tractor. But aside from that, they’re mostly just pets. We got Firewood first, and then a neighbor was moving and gave us these two as a package deal.”