Total pages in book: 248
Estimated words: 236036 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1180(@200wpm)___ 944(@250wpm)___ 787(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236036 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1180(@200wpm)___ 944(@250wpm)___ 787(@300wpm)
It had to be painful for him to talk about, and she regretted bringing it up. What a sad life for a kid, she thought. “If you don’t want—”
“It’s okay, Allegra. I should probably have told you years ago. Anyway, long story short, I started getting in trouble. Small stuff first, and then bigger stuff. Eventually I ended up in court, and they were threatening to send me to juvie.” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.
“Wow, but you didn’t end up in juvie?” She couldn’t even picture it. Her husband was such a rule follower—if he hadn’t been, Pa might have walked in on something very different in that tack room.
“Not quite. There was this program for high-risk teens and the courts, at the time, were really invested in seeing if it helped. So, I got sent here with a bunch of other angry, lost kids.”
“So, you weren’t really an employee. You were a … prisoner?”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t say we were prisoners. There were no locks on the doors. We could leave any time … if we wanted to walk twenty miles and risk breaking probation. But yeah, when I first got here, I was technically sentenced to stay until I was eighteen.”
It was her turn to be quiet. She knew she should probably say something, but honestly, she was having trouble taking it all in.
After a few minutes of quiet, he continued. There was a lot more to the story. He told her how he’d struggled at first, like they all had. There had been fights, anger, even one attempt to run away. He explained how, over time, he’d started to find peace in the work.
By the time he was eighteen, he’d made a place for himself. The anger had washed away with the sweat, and he was practically a different person. “I asked if I could stay on, as a hand, and they thought it over and agreed with some conditions.”
“What conditions?”
“First, I had to get my GED and I did. It took a while because I’d missed, basically, half of high school with all the moving around. Pa tutored me nights and weekends, and I got there eventually. Oh, and I got paid the same as the other guys, but half of it had to go into a savings account, which they supervised until I left.”
Her respect for the older couple went up a few notches. They’d gone out of their way to help Carter make a better life for himself. “It sounds like you had a good thing here.”
“I did.”
“I’m surprised you left,” she said cautiously.
He shot her a look she couldn’t decipher, and was about to say something, when another couple, Lydia and Brian, caught up with them. They’d been keeping a slower pace as they talked, and a lot of the others had passed them up already. Eventually they’d be at the end of the line, and she was fine with that.
Carter’s mouth closed, as they waited for them to pass. Only, instead of just moving up the line, they hung around and made small talk for a little while, much to Ally’s frustration.
“The riding part isn’t so bad,” Lydia explained. “But my thighs are already killing me. I’m going to be walking funny later, and not for a good reason.”
Allegra was dying to hear the rest of Carter’s story, but since Lydia was one of the women she’d started to bond with, she struggled to be polite. It was an effort that involved a lot of fake smiles, and a promise to meet after dinner at the hot tub. “A good soak will help your legs,” Allegra promised.
“You’re so right. If it wasn’t for the hot tub I would have given up by now and gone home,” Lydia said, laughing.
Brian snorted. “This whole thing was your idea in the first place!”
They started to bicker back and forth and stopped paying attention to anything else. After a few moments, Allegra exchanged looks with her husband, and without a word, they both slowed their mounts to let the other couple get ahead of them.
Once there was enough space that they wouldn’t be overheard, she said, “See, we’re already improving our silent communication skills.”
Carter laughed. “Apparently we just needed good enough motivation. Anyway, uh, where was I?”
“You were saying why you left,” she said, though that wasn’t entirely true. She’d just hoped that was what he was about to say.
“Ah, right. Well,” and then he stopped there for a long time, as if he wasn’t sure how to continue. When he finally went on, the words came out in a rush. “They wanted me to consider college. I didn’t want to. I figured I’d be fine right here, but they said I should at least think about it, because I should know all my options.”