I smell grain dust and leather and the particular funk of a building that’s been storing animal feed for fifty years, and for a split second I’m twelve years old and Earl’s behind me and everything is still whole.
Then I seehim.
Lee Simms, or as most know him—Banshee—is standing by the register.
The physical shock of it stops me three steps inside the door.
Like walking face-first into a wall you didn’t see—the kind of impact that doesn’t hurt right away because your body is too busy processing the fact that the world has rearranged itself without your permission.
Five and a half years.
He’s harder than I remember.
That’s the first thing I notice, and I hate myself for noticing, because the second thing I notice is that he’s still the kind of man who makes a room feel smaller just by standing in it.
Tall. Broad.
The build of someone who works with his hands every day and doesn’t think about it.
He’s wearing jeans and a dark Henley pushed up at the forearms, and his arms are—I don’t look at his arms.
I look at his face.
The warmth is gone.
That’s what hits me hardest.
Lee used to have a face that invited you in—easy eyes, quick smile, the kind of open expression that made people trust him on instinct.
The man standing at the counter looks like someone locked all those doors and threw away the keys.
His jaw is set. His eyes are flat.
There’s a stillness to him that reads like patience if you don’t know better and reads like armoring if you do.
I know better.
His left hand is on the counter.
The gold band catches the overhead light.
He’sstillwearing it, almost six years later, and he’s still wearing it.
Something cracks in my chest—grief and anger and a longing so sharp it makes my teeth ache, all of it tangled together in a knot I’ve been carrying for so long I barely notice the weight anymore.
Barely.
He sees me.
I watch it happen in real time—the recognition, the freeze, the rapid-fire calculation behind his eyes as his brain processes the impossible fact that Bex Dalton is standing ten feet away from him in a feed store in Sharp, Texas, after five and a half years of silence.
His jaw tightens.
His body goes still in a way that isn’t calm—it’s the stillness of a man deciding whether to fight or run.
I don’t give him the chance to do either.
“Lee.”
