The air smelled like dust and sunshine when she stepped out of the car. It was quiet. The kind of quiet that made Sistine’s city-trained ears twitch, listening for the constant hum that wasn’t there. Just wind, cicadas, and the distant creak of a gate.

She shaded her eyes from the bright sun. The farm stretched out in every direction with wide fields, tall fences, and a barn that looked older than anything she’d ever seen up close. Her sneakers sank slightly into the gravel. She already missed concrete.

Then she saw him.

Out in the ring, a boy was riding. Not in that neat, perfect, posture-obsessed way she’d seen on TV, but something slower, looser. He moved with the horse, or maybe the horse moved with him. A rhythm she couldn’t quite separate. The reins were slack, his weight easy in the saddle. When the horse slid to a stop, the dirt flared around them like a wave frozen mid-crash.

She caught her breath. It wasn’t that he was particularly beautiful, even though the sunlight did catch in his hair when he turned, but there was something about the way he belonged there. Like the hat, the dust, the saddle, even the air all knew him.

Her suitcase handle slipped from her fingers.

He noticed her then, or maybe he’d known she was there all along. He tipped his hat, a small gesture that somehow felt older than both of them. Then he said something to the horse she couldn’t hear, and they moved off again, that same effortless motion that made her chest tighten in ways she didn’t understand.

She’d come to this farm for a summer she didn’t ask for: a “break from everything,” her mother said. But as she watched the boy ride, something shifted.