A small, sleep-warm smile that she gives before she's awake enough to guard it.
Then she sees what I'm doing.
The smile fades. Not into sadness—into attention.
Into the stillness of a woman who reads horses and men with the same instinct and knows when something important is happening.
She doesn't speak, doesn't move.
She just gives me the space the way I give the rescue horses space—quiet, patient, letting the creature decide.
"I'm scared." My voice is rough. Morning and emotion and the effort of saying something I've never said out loud. "Taking it off feels like saying she's really gone."
Bex is quiet for a moment. Her dark eyes on mine.
Then, gentle but honest—because that's Bex, always honest, even when honesty is the harder kindness:
"Sheisreally gone, Lee."
The words land like a stone dropping into still water.
Not cruel. Not cold. Just true.
The simplest, most devastating truth there is, spoken by the only person in the world who has the right to say it to me—because she lost Rose too.
"The ring is the last piece of her I carry every day." I'm looking at it. The scratch on the left side from a fence post at Earl's ranch. The dull spot where my glove wears against it when I ride. "Every morning I wake up and I feel it and it means she was real. She existed. We existed. If I take it off?—"
My throat closes. I can't finish.
Bex sits up.
The sheet falls to her waist.
She's wearing one of my shirts—too big on her, slipping off one shoulder, and the sight of her in my clothes with her hair wild and her eyes full of something fierce and fragile does things to my chest.
She takes my left hand. Both of hers around mine. Holds it steady.
"You're not nothing without that ring." Her voice is low. Certain. The voice she uses with frightened horses—not soft, not soothing, but grounded. Real.
The voice that says I'm not going to lie to you because you deserve better than that. "You're the manshechose. You're the man who loved her so well that losing her broke you for half a decade. That's not in the metal, Lee. Rose isn't in the ring. Rose isinyou. Taking off a piece of gold doesn't change that."
I'm crying. Quietly.
The tears come the way they did with the voicemails—not the ugly, racking sobs of a man falling apart, but the silent, steady leak of a man letting something go.
Pressure releasing. Five and a half years of holding the door shut against a flood and finally, carefully, opening it.
"She'd be so mad at me." A wet laugh. Broken and real. "For wasting all this time. She'd look at me with that face—you know the one?—"
"The disappointed-teacher face." Bex's eyes are wet too. She's smiling. "Hands on her hips. The look that could make a grown man apologize for something he hadn't even done yet."
"Yeah." I can see it. Rose in the kitchen doorway, flour on her nose, eyebrows raised, waiting for me to figure out what I'd done wrong.
The memory doesn't hurt the way it used to. It aches—but it's the ache of something loved, not something lost. "She'd be furious. At both of us. Years of being stupid."
"Yeah. She would." Bex squeezes my hand. "And then she'd tell us to stop being idiots and go be happy."
A sound comes out of me that's half laugh, half sob.
