Liv picked up the iPad and hit replay on the song coming through the Bluetooth speakers. She intended to set the tablet back down on the ledge in the barn, but she hesitated, picked it back up, and scrolled through the Twitter feed. It took her a minute to zip through the hundred new tweets. There was nothing from the only person she hoped for. Why would there be? It was ten in the morning.
Liv had checked at least four times in as many hours. What rock star tweeted between midnight and noon? Logical, but it didn’t stop her from looking. Besides, he would never define himself that way. Just a working musician, he’d say. He might even admit to being a songwriter. And a dad. Not that she’d be having a conversation with him.
A car pulled up outside the barn as she tapped the screen to check Facebook, also for the fourth time that morning.
“Oh Liv, aren’t you getting tired of listening to this? Time for a new playlist.” Paige Cochran planted her heels in the dirt to shift the heavy barn door open. As usual, Paige dressed more as though she was going to a high-powered meeting at the investment firm she consulted for, not to visit her best friend’s barn.
“But I love this song,” Liv muttered as she flicked through the playlists for something else to listen to.
“Here’s the thing—”
“Don’t say it. I can listen to whatever the hell I want to in my own damn barn.”
“Oh, a little testy this morning?”
“I’m sick of people complaining about my music,” Liv growled.
“People? What people? Who have you seen in the last few days other than Pooh and Micah?”
Pooh was a fourteen-year-old sweetheart of a mare. The quarter horse belonged to Liv’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, who stood firm on the name Pooh when they’d gotten the horse when she was ten. “You don’t know Winnie the Pooh is a boy. He might be a girl.” Renie, short for Irene, informed her, not realizing the slip in her own words.
“You’re right,” Liv had answered, rolling her eyes. “He may be a she. What was I thinking?”
The other horse, Micah, was Liv’s baby. The four-year-old appaloosa gelding showed promise as a barrel racer. Liv didn’t want to part with him for proper training, and she couldn’t train him herself. Those days were over for her. They had been since before Renie was born.
“You didn’t answer me. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I’m getting tired of my own company. I’m bored, and sick of the cold weather.”
“I sent you a text asking if you wanted to meet for breakfast, but you didn’t answer.”
“Oh sorry, I haven’t checked my phone. I’m done out here, we can go into town if you still want to.”
“We can stay here. I know you have coffee, and something fresh out of the oven that I shouldn’t eat, but will anyway.”
Liv made cinnamon scones that morning before she came out to the barn to get her chores done. With Renie away at college, she ended up adding most of what she baked to her already overloaded freezer.
“Aren’t you a little overdressed to have coffee with me?”
“I have a business proposition for you. I intended to talk you into going to Denver with me later this morning.”
Paige managed to get herself involved in at least one new business venture a month. For someone semi-retired, she still worked fifty or sixty hours a week. If there was a deal to be made between Denver and Colorado Springs, Paige ended up on the inside edge of making it happen. She was very different from the room mom Liv met fifteen years ago when their daughters started kindergarten together.
