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nothing mattered but her job, and in the end, it didn’t really matter, either.
    She was one of those people whose name could be wiped off the whiteboard of life and no one would notice. David hadn’t called since he moved out months ago. Her parents hadn’t bothered to check to see if she’d made it safely to Texas. If she disappeared, there would be no one to fill out a missing person report.
    Jubilee guessed if she’d been able to mark her growth with lines on a doorframe, her chart would be heading down, not up. When she’d left what she’d thought would be a brilliant career, not one person had dropped by to shake her hand. No farewell cake. Not even a card.
    As she stood in the doorway of her great-grandfather’s house that was now her only home, she wondered if things could get much worse. The man she’d hired as foreman on the place had said at breakfast—cereal and milk—that he’d finish moving in today and they’d walk the land tomorrow. But, with the downpour turning everything to mud, she doubted they’d be able to start for a week.
    Not that it mattered. She’d planned her last life and look how it had crumbled. Why bother to plan this one?
    Maybe she should take the opposite of her mother’s parting advice and go goalless for a while. She had forty thousand dollars in her bank account plus what she’d inherited. She could coast, at least for a while. Maybe she’d simply wait until a goal bumped into her for a change.
    She had no idea what she was doing out here in Texas. For all she knew the foreman, Charley Collins, was the local serial killer. He might not have stolen her card; murder might be his thing. Think about it, Jub, she almost said aloud. What are the chances that the man delivering groceries and working at the local bar knows how to run a farm? Correction, he’d called it a ranch.
    He did have his own horse, though. She had no idea if that was good or bad. What was a guy doing with a horse when he lived over a bar? Logic probably wasn’t his strong suit. He was easy on the eyes, though. The kind of guy who broke every heart he passed.
    Only not hers. Three of her four serious boyfriends had told her she didn’t have a heart. Majority vote.
    After breakfast, her new foreman disappeared for most of the day, then drove up midafternoon with his pickup full of boxes. He was pulling a trailer filled with a huge horse and a cute pony.
    Since she had nothing else to do, Jubilee interrupted her breakdown long enough to watch him move into the little house by the corral. He had an easy way of moving, like a man comfortable in his own body.
    She’d thought of going outside to stare at him or even help, but all her clothes were three wearings past dirty. The man in worn boots and a patched shirt had actually frowned when she’d greeted him at breakfast wearing a clean pair of old Levy’s socks and one of his long-sleeved shirts tied at her waist. Just to be proper she used a pair of her great-grandfather’s brand new boxer shorts as her shorts.
    Charley looked as though he’d never seen the fashion.
    She’d tried to explain that almost everything she owned was packed, but she doubted he’d like her navy suits any better. Three pairs of jeans and half a dozen tops were all the casual clothes she owned. And they were spotted with drippings from meals on the road or wrinkled beyond wearing.
    Tomorrow morning she planned to ask him to turn on the water to the washer out back. Levy probably turned it off every month after he used it, and who knew where the dryer had run off to? Jubilee had a faint memory of the old guy hanging his laundry on a line somewhere.
    She’d watched Charley unhitch his trailer and park it beside the barn, and then he’d left again just before the rain started. Jubilee finally moved out on the porch and studied the storm. At this point in her day of doing nothing, she