But Bex’s voice is the problem.
The sound of her through a phone speaker takes me back to every call Rose ever made from the road, every casual check-in, every “I’m on my way, be there soon” that I’ll never hear again.
The phone itself is the wound.
Every ring, every buzz, every woman’s voice through a speaker drops me back into that October night—the last sounds Rose ever made, filtered through a phone I was too far away to throw against a wall.
The call goes to voicemail.
A few seconds pass.
Then the phone buzzes again—a shorter pulse.
She left a message.
She always does.
I have years of them saved in a folder I’ve never opened.
A graveyard of words I can’t bring myself to hear.
The phone buzzes a second time.
Another call. She’s doing the double—calling back immediately, the way people do when they need you to know it’s important.
It vibrates in my hand like a living thing, insistent, refusing to be ignored.
My jaw tightens.
I stare at the screen.
Her name.
The same name I’ve been sending to voicemail for five and a half years.
Across the stall, the bay is watching me.
Both eyes now, ears forward.
Two damaged creatures in a dark barn, both deciding whether to trust the thing that’s reaching for them.
I power the phone off.
The screen goes black. The buzzing stops.
The barn settles back into its quiet—hay and breath and the distant sound of wind moving through the live oaks outside.
The bay doesn’t move and neither do I.
I twist the ring on my finger, close my eyes, and breathe.
Tomorrow I’ll be here again.
Same bucket. Same barn. Same man who can gentle a thousand-pound animal with nothing but patience and silence but can’t answer a phone call from a woman who loved his wife almost as much as he did.
The gold band catches the last sliver of light coming through the barn door before the dark swallows it.
I sit with the horse and I wait.
