Page 23 of The Cowboy Who Worked Late

Until Henry.

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I’m the second son, and Paul is perfect.” He sounded a little bitter about it. “I mean, he’s not perfect, but heseemsperfect. He doesn’t argue with my parents the way I do. He got great grades in high school and even went to college. I passed. I made it by, because I’m not really a school person. And then John is my next younger brother. He was like the prince of everything. He was on the football team. He was in student government. He got a scholarship to Baylor. It was like Momma and Daddy could just skip over me. Go from Paul to John and be just fine. They didn’t need a Henry.”

Angel didn’t like the sound of that at all. “They didn’t need a Henry?” She stuck her little spoon in her rice pudding and reached over and took Henry’s hand in hers. She brought it to lay flat against her stomach and curled hers over the top of it. “I think everyone needs a Henry.”

Henry drew in a sharp breath, and Angel wasn’t sure if it was born from emotion, or surprise, or something else entirely. “That’s a really nice thing to say.”

“Well, it’s true,” she said. “I’m not just saying it. Everyone needs a Henry. Lone Star would be lost without you. You lead the summer internship farriers with kindness and power. All of the horses love you. My daddy thinks you’re the greatest farrier we’ve had in years.”

“I’m not a master farrier,” Henry said.

“So what?” Angel said. “You still have value every day. Today you do. You showed me an amazing time. You helped me get out of my head. You helped me slow down.” She took a breath and watched the golds and oranges turn into bruises—purples and pinks and deep blues. “Sometimes I have a really hard time slowing down.”

Henry adjusted his hand, threaded his fingers through hers. “I do too,” he said. “I’ll help you slow down anytime you need it, Angel.”

She nodded, and the movement of the trampoline probably told him that, so she didn’t have to say anything. The sun dipped lower. She took another bite of the rice pudding on her baby-sized spoon.

“This is really good,” she said.

“See?” Henry said with a chuckle. “I’m not a liar, that’s for sure.”

Angel did like that about him. He was honest. He spoke his mind, sometimes in a fiery, passionate way. When he got fired up, it was something important, and everyone around him stopped to listen.

If he said nothing, it wasn’t that big of a deal. If he said his opinion and didn’t bring it up again, also not a big deal. But if he would go back and forth with someone and continue on an issue,trying to solve a problem, then it meant something to him, and Angel really needed to pay attention to what those things were.

“How’s Gilligan’s shoes?” she asked.

Henry let out a frustrated sigh. “Nothing’s working on him,” he said. “That horse deserves good shoes, and I’m gonna put together something for your daddy. I was gonna go see him last week, but it didn’t quite work out.”

“What are you going to propose?” she asked. “I think you’ve been through every shoe on the market.”

“Yep,” Henry said. “But they’re doing amazing things with 3D printing these days, Angel. And I think we can make a custom pair of shoes for every horse with a 3D printer.”

“3D printed shoes?” she asked. “That’s not going to last.”

“You’d be surprised what they can create,” he said. “I’ve been doing some research on it, which is why I didn’t go talk to your daddy yet. But I hope to have something new for him this week. If I can get on the computer at some point. Maybe tomorrow night when we get back.”

“Interesting,” she said, really impressed with Henry’s out-of-the-box thinking. “3D printed shoes.”

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re really amazing. You can print anything 3D now. There are all kinds of printers. You can print on doors and garage doors and stickers for cars. You can cut things out. I mean, the engineering school that I was in, we did tons of stuff with 3D printing.”

“What engineering program did you do?” she asked.

“Industrial engineering,” Henry said. “I have a degree in it and everything.”

“I didn’t know that about you.”

“Yeah, we used 3D printing a lot. We would use it for the construction of things, to do models, to see if something would resist weight, all of that kind of stuff. And I’ve played around with a lot of it, and I really think we can make horseshoes.”

“Will they be made out of metal?”

“No,” he said. “Not metal. That would be too heavy, and I’m not sure we can have a 3D printer that could do something like that.”

“Yeah, seems a little strange.”

“Yeah. So I’m thinking something maybe more lightweight, that’s real thin, that you might not even notice. Right now, I’m working on the materials. I’m going to put a presentation-type proposal thing together. If you’d like, you can come to the meeting when I’m ready.”

“I’d like that, Henry.”

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