Home by Natalie Keller Reinert

Author:Natalie Keller Reinert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: eventing, equestrian fiction, horse sports
Publisher: Natalie Keller Reinert
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

ALEX WAS WORKING in the training barn office when I got to Cotswold Farm a few hours later. She looked up from her laptop as I opened the door, a smile streaking across her tanned face. “Jules Thornton, look at you! I swear you’re bigger every time I see you.”

“That’s the worst greeting of all time,” I grumbled as she came from behind her desk and gave me a hug.

“Oh, relax, it’s only while you’re in foal.” Alex laughed and opened the fridge door. “Here, have a lemonade. I got these from the farmer’s market in downtown Ocala.”

“You go to farmer’s markets now?” I asked suspiciously, popping the seal on the lid. The glass bottle had a smiling lemon on it. “Sounds like someone has too much time on her hands.”

“It’s almost September,” Alex said with a shrug. “I’m going to be inundated in a few weeks with weaning and starting yearlings and then it’s going to go straight into breeding season, but for a few weeks in late summer I let myself pretend I’m a normal person.”

“That sounds terrible,” I told her, throwing myself into a chair. “Being a normal person, I mean.”

“You think? Try the lemonade.”

I drank almost half of it before I could bear to stop. “This is incredible,” I admitted.

“See?” Alex smiled. “Normal life can have occasional perks.”

“Not many, I’ll bet.”

“The other thing normal people have is the ability to separate their job from their housing,” Alex continued.

“Meh. Sounds fake.”

She laughed. “I know. It can’t be true. I almost wish we still had the trailer court we had here years ago. You could have lived in one of our old single-wides. Maybe even the one I lived in when I first came to Ocala. Wouldn’t that have been nostalgic?”

I imagined living in a moldy old trailer from the eighties. I wasn’t a picky woman, but after living in my comfortable house for the past two years, I wasn’t in a hurry to turn back the clock and live in one of the hovels I’d have found acceptable in my early twenties.

“I’m thinking more along the lines of a barn apartment or a mother-in-law apartment,” I said. “Something that at least resembles modern living. I’m not twenty-one anymore, you know. I have standards now.”

“I figured you’d got fancy on me,” Alex sighed. “Well, I might have something, but it’s small.”

“Is it, though? There’s nothing small on Cotswold Farm,” I countered. “I’ve been in your house.” Alex and Alexander lived in a 1980s nightmare of modern design which had been out of style the day the foundation was poured. It had cavernous living spaces on a second floor and weird, shadowy guest bedrooms tucked onto a first floor which pressed into a hillside. Its only charms were the copious windows overlooking the farm, so there was always a horse in sight. “Maybe you should just hide us on the first floor, like a little burrow.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “You don’t want that. Ugh, that place is a nightmare.

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