CHAPTER TWO
Bex
My alarm goes off at 4:30 and I’m already awake.
Haven’t slept more than four hours straight since I moved back.
The guest room at Earl’s ranch has a mattress older than I am and a window that faces east, so the pre-dawn glow hits me right in the face around four whether I want it to or not.
But it’s not the mattress.
It’s not the light.
It’s the house itself—the sounds it makes in the dark, the settling and creaking of old wood, the way the hallway floorboards moan when you step on the third one from the bathroom.
I know these sounds the way you know your own heartbeat.
I grew up in this house more than I grew up in my own.
The difference is that now, at 4:30 in the morning, I can hear Earl coughing through the wall.
Not the dry, bark-like cough of a man who’s been breathing Texas dust for sixty-something years.
This is wet. Deep.
The kind that starts in the bottom of the lungs and drags itself up like something trying to climb out.
It goes on for thirty seconds, a minute, while I lie in the dark and count the gaps between each one and try to remember what the oncologist said about when a cough becomes something to worry about versus just the chemo doing its job.
Everything about this is something to worry about.
Stage 3.
The words sit in my chest like shrapnel.
The coughing stops. I hear the creak of his bed frame, the shuffle of slippers on hardwood, the bathroom door closing.
He’s up.
Which means I’m up.
Which means another day of pretending I have any idea what I’m doing.
I swing my legs off the bed.
My boots are on the floor where I left them—always within reach, a habit from a childhood where leaving fast was sometimes the only option.
My hands ache before I even flex them.
Knuckles, fingers, the deep muscles of my forearms that do the work of gripping a horse’s hoof against a thousand pounds of resistance.
A farrier’s hands.
Earl’s hands, once. Now mine.
I pull on jeans, a flannel, a thermal underneath because October mornings in the country still bite before the sun gets involved.
Braid my hair back without looking in the mirror because the mirror in the guest room is the same one Rose and I used to stand in front of as kids, and some mornings I can’t look at my own reflection without seeing the ghost of a twelve-year-oldblonde girl standing beside me, both of us giggling while Earl hollered from the kitchen that the biscuits were burning.
