Page 5 of Back in the Saddle

I strode to his desk and placed the container down. My forward momentum made it hit the desk harder than intended. I winced. Ciaron turned his attention from his computer screen to the container and then to me.

“Thank you for dinner,” I said.

“No problem.” He smiled, small, the smile not reaching his green eyes. On the day we met, those green eyes sparkled with mischief. I hadn’t seen that sparkle for a very long time. Was it as dead as our marriage? If anything, one would hope being separated would make him come alive again.

His small smile disappeared. “The kids said they’d text you tonight before dinner. They reckon it’s your turn to cook for me. You can bring me leftovers for lunch tomorrow.” The lightness in his voice was forced.

I clenched my teeth and stared at him, willing myself to be calm. “I don’t need you to remind me of my failures.”

The fact that Isabelle and Callum hadn’t been at home when I’d got there last night was evidence enough. I doubt the only reason they went to his house was for the food.

Ciaron raised his eyebrows. Was he looking for a fight?

Calm. I needed to stay calm.

I crossed my arms. “I wouldn’t have to cook dinner if you hadn’t left us.”

Yep, willing myself to be calm had worked so well.

Ciaron broke eye contact with me, picked up the container and put it next to his. I took a tiny step back and looked down at my feet. What was I doing? I’d come here to thank him, not blame him for our breakup. Ciaron was trying to tell mein his gentle way that I’d been neglecting the kids. Gentle, not accusing. Well, maybe accusing. I don’t fucking know.

“When did we stop communicating?” I asked.

“When you stopped listening,” he said in a resigned tone.

It was back to being my fault again.

“Maybe you should have listened to my silence,” I snapped.

“Like that even makes sense.”

I sighed. There was no point to this conversation. It was getting me nowhere.

“Spag bol OK?” I asked. It was one of a handful of things I did well.

“I love spag bol.”

I nodded and went back to my office. Why was I such an arsehole? Because he was better at this single parent shit than I was? I should be grateful for the kids’ sake that he was. But the selfish me wanted the kids to be angry with him, just a little, for leaving us.

I stared out the window to what should be a lush, manicured lawn, but was now patchy and green-brown under the dull winter sun. I could see most of the paddocks from my window and the colours varied from brown to green the closer they got to the river. This drought felt like it was going on forever.

It had hit the Hunter Valley hard. All the predictions said we were supposed to get rain this autumn. It hadn’t happened. And now the forecasters said it wouldn’t. No rain meant no grass in the paddocks. We irrigated as much as we could, but no rain also meant reduced water allocations. No grass meant that we had to buy hay and feed for the horses. And just like everything else during a drought, horse feed was more expensive, due to high demand and limited availability. We were lucky that the larger studs in the area grew their own hay and sold it to the smaller studs at a discounted price.

The winter gloom had not only settled into the sky, but my heart as well. The feed bills had been piling up over the past few months. I was forever juggling feed bills, payments from clients, wages and vet bills.

I sighed and looked at the bank balance. Wages needed to be paid first. Our employees needed to eat and live. Soon, we’d also be paying the two new employees Ciaron had hired for the breeding season.

I closed my eyes as I remembered the rip-roaring argument we’d had about it. I’d never seen Ciaron so angry in all our years together. He was yelling and talking at such speed even I had trouble understanding him with his accent. That argument put an end to our twenty-year marriage. Twenty years of commitment gone just like that. It was probably a miracle it hadn’t happened sooner. It was inevitable, really.

The same thing had happened to my parents.

My father’s prediction about our love drying up and Ciaron returning to Ireland echoed in my brain. The fantasy lasted longer than he could have expected. Longer than his did with Mum.

The two-way crackled. “Ciaron, are you on channel?” Rachel, the Foaling Unit Manager, said.

“Yes.”

“Can you come down to River Paddock, please? Dior is acting strange.”

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