He comes around the corner.
Cowboy hat. Dusty boots.
Coffee in one hand, lead rope in the other, a gray mare following him like a dog.
The new rescue—came in three weeks ago from a kill pen outside Abilene, underweight, hoof-sore, head-shy.
She’s already following him. They always do. Something about Lee’s patience, his stillness, the way he takes up space without demanding anything from the creature sharing it.
Broken things trust him. I would know.
He sees me on the porch.
The smile—the real one, the one that still makes my chest do something structurally inadvisable—spreads across his face.
Unhurried. Easy. The smile of a man who wakes up without dread.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
He ties the mare and climbs the porch steps and kisses me with coffee on his breath and hay in his hair, and theordinariness of it is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever experienced.
Once we finish up for the day, we head over to Grace and Shadow’s place.
Braxton is four months old and has his father’s jaw and his mother’s eyes and an opinion about everything that he expresses at volume.
He’s on Lee’s chest right now—sprawled face-down on the broad flat of Lee’s sternum, one tiny fist curled against his collarbone, sleeping the boneless, absolute sleep of an infant who has decided that this particular surface is acceptable.
Lee is in the armchair.
One hand spanning the baby’s entire back, the other resting on the arm of the chair.
His head is tipped back. His eyes are closed.
He’s not sleeping—I can tell by the way his thumb moves in slow circles on the baby’s back, the unconscious rhythm of a man soothing a child without thinking about it, the way you breathe or blink, the way your body does what it was built to do.
I stand in the doorway and watch them.
Six months ago—a year ago—this would have broken him.
The weight of a baby on his chest, the small trusting body, the future that someone else got to have.
There’s no performance on his face.
No longing. No grief threaded through the tenderness.
Just a man holding his best friend’s son, his bare left hand warm against the baby’s back, Rose’s ring glinting on his right, and the expression on his face is?—
Peace. That’s what it is. Just peace.
Grace appears beside me, leans against the doorframe.
She’s thinner than she was pregnant but there’s a fullness to her now that has nothing to do with weight—the settled quality of a woman whose family is in the next room and whose body did the impossible thing and whose life, despite everything, turned out to hold more good than she probably expected.
“He’s a natural,” she says quietly. Watching Lee and Braxton.
“He was always going to be.”
