The barn is about as tall as a three-story house, with the hayloft taking up two-thirds of its height. Below, where there would originally have been housing for all variety of animals and equipment, there’s an open area for storage and eight modern, steel-framed horse stalls.

The stalls have been clean-swept and empty ever since Robbie quit the training business. But sometimes when he comes in, for a moment, he still expects to see certain horses he rode in the past. The ones who left impressions on him for various reasons. It’s like the memories fill the stalls with ghosts for a moment, so Robbie tries not to look at all. There are more good memories for him down here than bad ones, but the bad ones are like quicksand, pulling him under and making him blind to the rest.

He still uses one of the stalls on the end for his own horses, but only occasionally. It currently contains Poco. After pushing the horse to get back to the house after Danny’s call, Robbie unsaddled him and put him in the stall under a fleece cooler to let his body slowly cool down while Robbie jumped in the truck.

Poco lifts his head from the pile of hay in the corner, and seeing that Robbie isn’t coming his way, resumes eating. Robbie leans against the wall and fishes his phone out of his pocket. Danny has been calling nonstop for the past hour, but Robbie didn’t want to answer in front of Lance.

Lance, who’s above him, mere feet away. Robbie peers up at the floorboards that make up the ceiling from where he stands, suddenly cautious even though he knows from experience that sound doesn’t really carry through those thick old planks.

Danny answers on the first ring.

“Finally! Did you see him? Is he okay? What—?”

“Slow down,” Robbie tells him, keeping his voice down, just in case. “Yeah, I just went and picked him up. He’s—he’s in the hayloft. I think he’s fine.”

There’s a long pause. “He came home with you?” Danny asks at last, his tone guarded.

Robbie has never been entirely sure what Danny knows about the events of the night before Lance left town, six years ago. It’s never seemed right for Robbie to tell Danny if Lance didn’t want to tell Danny himself. But the not knowing has led to a lot of awkwardness whenever the subject of Lance comes up.

Over the years, it’s also become more than clear that Megan wasn’t the only one who was aware of Lance’s crush on Robbie. Sometimes Robbie thinks that he himself was the absolute last one to know. Johnny mentioned it a couple years back and acted surprised it was any kind of secret. Danny must have known, too.

“Yeah.” Again, he has a strange urge to protect Lance’s privacy, but it seems nonsensical, considering that Danny knows Lance better than Robbie could ever hope to, despite their estrangement, and besides that, Danny is Robbie’s brother. “It didn’t seem like he had anywhere else to go,” Robbie admits.