Not toward me—just a shift, a rearrangement.
But he’s watching me now.
Both eyes. Nostrils working.
“I know,” I tell him. Quiet enough that it’s barely a vibration. “Me too.”
My phone buzzes in my back pocket.
I know before I look.
The same way you know a storm’s coming by the way the air changes—something tightens, something shifts, and your body braces before your brain catches up.
I pull it out.
The screen glows in the dark barn.
Bex Dalton.
The name sits on the screen like a dare.
I stare at it while the phone vibrates in my hand, each pulse a small detonation against my palm.
Bex.
Rose’s best friend since they were eight years old.
The woman who was waiting at a restaurant while my wife bled out on a highway.
The woman who showed up at my house the next morning with mascara down her face and said the words I can’t unhear: She was coming to see me.
She’s been calling for years.
Not constantly—she’s not crazy about it.
But regularly. Persistently.
Once a week at first, those early months when everyone was still raw and broken and trying to hold the pieces of Rose’s absence together.
Then every couple of weeks.
Then monthly.
Then clustered around the dates that matter—Rose’s birthday, the anniversary, Christmas, the milestones that used to be celebrations and are now just days I have to survive.
I haven’t answered once.
Not because I blame her.
That ugly flicker I felt the morning after—the irrational, grief-poisoned thought that Rose was on that road because of Bex—I know it’s not fair.
I know the rain killed Rose.
The road killed Rose.
God or physics or the particular angle of a tire on wet asphalt killed Rose.
Not dinner plans. Not the woman who made them.
