“What? Rob—”

Rob, Dan, John. They’ve only ever called each other that. Robbie dashes at the tears gathering under his eyes and fights to keep his voice steady. “It’s hard sometimes, out here all alone.” With that enormous, shameful sentiment out of him, he deflates, most of the anger leaving him in the same rush. “I don’t mean I don’t love it. But it can be…hard.” He swallows.

There’s silence on the line again, but this feels different than before.

“I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“I don’t—it’s not always.” He’s kept any thoughts of this kind to himself, always. His brothers have gone, and he never wanted them to feel like they had to stay. But the words come out of him, a tumble he can’t stop, like rocks knocked loose from a cliff face. “I’m just lonely, I guess.”

“Oh.” Danny’s voice is so small, almost a whisper. There’s a flash of static, like he’s cleared his throat but with his phone a little too close to his mouth. Then he breathes, “Me, too, sometimes.”

Robbie stands up straight, pushing himself upright from the countertop. “I didn’t know that.”

A huff comes—one of Danny’s humorless laughs. “I didn’t want you to think I was ungrateful. For all you did, and for what you didn’t get to do because you were taking care of us. But even though all I ever wanted when I was growing up was to get off the ranch…as soon as I got out here, all I wanted was to come home.”

Robbie is floored. He doesn’t know what to say except, “I wish you’d felt like you could tell me.”

“Well, likewise.”

“You know I love you?”

“Yeah. I do. And me, too. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.” Robbie rubs a hand over his faint smile, heart a little fuller, and the strain of the pressure causes him a faint pain. “Yeah. I know that.”

There’s an almost comical irony when he figures it out—that burst of strange adrenaline that makes a body want to laugh even though something’s not exactly funny. How has it taken him this long, he wonders, to realize that it wasn’t only taking care of the boys that made him content here on the ranch? It was caring for them and being cared for in return.

He misses having someone to take care of. But what he misses as much, and maybe yearns to have on a level he hasn’t in the past, is to be taken care of himself.

He considers his father’s advice about solving problems on a long ride, but he thinks it might have less to do with being on the back of a horse and more to do with moving, preferably through trees and grass. Somewhere you can hear water running. He thinks of playing by the creek as a child with only his imagination and the quiet trees for company. He used to wish his parents would have another kid—someone he could play with. Part of the reason he was so glad when Lance first showed up in their lives was because it meant that Danny wasn’t so alone.