Grace folds her hands over her belly.
The boy kicks—I can see it, a visible ripple across the fabric of her shirt—and she presses her palm flat against it without thinking. “Technically, she and my father have been split for years. A long time. But she never really… left. She was still around. Still acting like an ol’ lady. Showing up to club events, sitting in that seat next to him, handling things behind the scenes. The role was hers even if the relationship wasn’t.”
“But he wasn’t in love with her.”
“No.” Grace says it without judgment.
Flat, factual, the assessment of a woman who loves both her parents and has stopped pretending the truth is anything other than what it is. “I don’t know if he ever was. Not the way she needed him to be. My father is… he’s a lot of things. Loyal. Principled. A great president. But he kept her at arm’s length for years and she stayed anyway because she loved him and because the club was her life and because leaving meant admitting it was over.”
“What happened?”
“It just… deteriorated. Slowly. She could tell things were going sideways. She’d get jealous when he paid attention to theclubwhores—which, I mean, she wasn’t his ol’ lady anymore, not really, but she was still acting like it, still sitting in that chair, and watching him notice other women was…” Grace trails off. Shakes her head. “It got ugly. Not violent. Just corrosive. The kind of thing that eats away at both people until there’s nothing left but resentment and habit.”
“So, she left.”
“She left the clubhouse. She didn’t leave Sharp. She’s still here. Still twenty minutes away. Still my mother.” Grace’s hand circles on her belly. “And my father still doesn’t talk about her. The brothers don’t bring her up. It’s like she’s been erased from the club, and everyone just… agreed to pretend she was never there.”
“That’s not fair to her.”
“No. It’s not.” Grace looks at me. Something passes between us—the recognition of two women who understand what it means to love someone in a world that doesn’t always make room for the women who hold it together. “My mother never stopped loving my father. I think that’s the part that breaks my heart. She just couldn’t keep loving him from that close without it destroying her.”
I reach over and squeeze her hand. She squeezes back.
“Dad watches you and Lee sometimes,” she says quietly. “The way Lee used to watch Shadow and me. That look that’s happy for someone else and hurting for yourself at the same time.”
I think about Lee in the chapel. Two men haunted by women. Load-bearing walls around an empty room.
“She should know her grandson,” I say.
Grace’s eyes go bright. She blinks hard. “Yeah. She should, and she will.”
After I spend some time with Grace, Lee and I head over to Earl’s ranch.
Lee fixes things. I check the horses.
We sit with Earl and drink coffee and look out across the land.
Today is different.
Earl’s had an appointment three days ago, and one of his cancer center friends drove him.
He insisted I don’t take him… and while I don’t understand why, I don’t dare argue with him.
The oncologist in San Marcos, the one with the kind eyes and the habit of speaking in percentages and timelines.
The results came back this morning.
He tells us on the porch.
Matter-of-fact, the way Earl tells everything—weather reports, cattle prices, the death sentence his own body has handed him.
The cancer is spreading. The chemo bought time, but the time has limits.
They’re shifting to palliative care.
Comfort. Quality over quantity.
The oncologist used the word “months” instead of “years” and Earl heard it the way a rancher hears a forecast—as information to plan around, not to panic over.
