Grace squeezes my arm.
The gesture that became our shorthand somewhere between her pregnancy and my grief—the silent language of two women who don’t need to explain themselves to each other.
Shadow comes in from the kitchen with two beers and stops when he sees Lee and the baby.
His face does something complicated—love, relief, the gratitude of a man watching his brother come back from the dead.
He looks at me. I look at him.
We share the moment without a word, the way family does, the way people who survived the same storm look at each other across a room and think: we’re here. We made it through.
I pass the photograph every morning.
It’s in the Saints’ barn, on the post by the cross-ties where I do most of my work. Rose and me.
Twelve years old. Earl’s barn.
Two girls with their arms around each other, squinting into the sun, grinning with the fearless certainty of children who believe the world is kind because the people raising them made it so.
Rose’s hair is white-blonde in the sun.
Mine is dark, braided badly, already escaping.
We’re in matching boots—Earl bought them for us, two pairs, same style, different sizes—and Rose’s are clean because Rose was careful and mine are caked in mud because I was not.
I touch the frame. The way I do every morning. The wood is warm from the barn heat.
I see you. I remember. I’m okay.
More than okay.
I’m smiling when I turn from the photo.
There’s a mare waiting in the cross-ties and a schedule full of clients and a life that doesn’t pause for sentiment, which is fine.
Sentiment doesn’t need a pause.
It lives in the work. In the hands.
In the morning routine of a woman who touches a photograph and picks up a rasp and does the thing she was built to do.
By the time I finish up for the day, Lee’s on the couch.
I’m in the kitchen, washing the dishes he cooked dinner in, because we have a system—he cooks, I clean, we argue about whose music plays, and the argument is the best part because Lee has terrible taste and refuses to admit it.
His phone buzzes on the counter.
I watch him.
I guess I can’t help it.
The reflex—old now, but not gone—of watching Lee hear a phone ring and waiting for the flinch.
The jaw tightening. The screen going face-down. The powering off.
Years of a man who couldn’t hear a phone buzz without being dragged back to a highway in the rain and the last sounds his wife ever made.
Lee picks up the phone, looks at the screen and swipes.
