Short work was made of the morning chores; Ryan filled the troughs, restocked the feeders, and mucked out the stalls in less than an hour. After setting the horses loose in the field, he then grabbed his hat and journal from the tack room, dragged his chair into the sun, and sat down to check the day’s bookings. But when he flipped to inspect the entries, he discovered that both the morning and afternoon columns were empty. No groups were due to come through. Not one single rider.

Ryan slammed the journal shut and sank low into his chair, frustrated, but not entirely surprised. This was how the ranch made its money—scenic treks across the valley and trail rides around the neighboring state park forest—but visitor numbers had been dropping for a while and blank pages like these were becoming increasingly common. In fact, business had been so quiet that days on end could go by without a soul coming through the gate.

When this first started happening, Ryan had shrugged it off, trying to convince himself that it was nothing more than a seasonal blip, but it was getting harder to stay positive when each month the business seemed to plunge to new lows. The reason for the downtrend? He honestly couldn’t say. Perhaps they needed to advertise more. But how? The ranch probably needed a page on the Internet to promote itself, but Ryan didn’t have the first clue about setting up something like that. Computers were like voodoo to him. Their business had always survived on word of mouth and a stack of flyers inside the town hotel. In the past, that had been enough. Not anymore, it seemed.

But that wasn’t the worst of it—what Ryan found most difficult was hiding all this from his father. When it came to anything to do with money, Ryan had made it a rule to always keep him in the dark. The doctors had said that avoiding stress and high blood pressure was critical to his long-term recovery. Fifty percent of people who had a stroke went on to have another, and they warned that it would be unlikely his father could survive a second one. Worrying over finances was the last thing he needed. But keeping up this charade was becoming more and more difficult, particularly on days like today when the ranch sat conspicuously empty.

“It’s just a quiet patch,” Ryan would often say. “Plenty of bookings coming up.”

Lies.

All of them.