Bex lifts her glass. I lift mine.
“To Earl,” she says. Steady.
Her eyes are swollen and her voice is raw and she has never looked more beautiful to me than she does right now—a woman made of grief and iron and the stubborn, furious refusal to let the people she loves disappear without being honored.
“To Earl.”
The glasses touch. The ice shifts. We drink.
The whiskey is warm going down.
Smooth.
It tastes like Earl’s kitchen and Sunday dinners and the low rumble of a man’s voice telling stories about a daughter who climbed barn rafters. It tastes like the land we’re sitting on—old, deep-rooted, built to last.
Bex reaches across Earl’s empty chair.
I take her hand.
Her left in my left—bare hands, the future, the ink on our forearms catching the last of the light. My right hand holds the whiskey, Rose’s ring on the finger, the past in my palm.
Both hands full. Both hands holding something that matters.
We sit on Earl’s porch and watch the sun go down over land that is ours now.
Not because we wanted it this way.
Not because this is the ending anyone would have chosen.
But because a man who spent his whole life building something worth keeping looked at the two people his daughter loved and said:this is yours. Take care of it. Take care of each other.
The sky goes orange. Then copper. Then the deep, bruised purple of a Texas evening settling in.
The bay turns from the fence. Walks back into the pasture. Head up. Stride even. Sound.
“I love you,” I say. Not for the first time. Not for the last.
“I love you too.” She squeezes my hand. “He’s with Rose now.”
“Yeah.” The tears come again. Quiet. Clean. “Yeah, he is.”
We finish the whiskey. The ice melts. The porch light hums.
And two people who learned the hard way that love doesn’t protect you from loss—but that loss doesn’t cancel love—sit together on a porch in Texas and hold on to everything they have left.
Which, it turns out, is enough.
EPILOGUE
BEX
Six months later….
The bluebonnets came early this year.
They’re everywhere—blanketing the pastures along the highway, crowding the ditches, pooling in the low spots of Earl’s land like someone tipped a bucket of blue paint across the fields.
Texas in May is shameless about beauty.
