His name comes out steadier than I feel.
Good.
I’ve had five and a half years of ignored phone calls to practice saying his name without my voice breaking.
Five and a half years of voicemails left into a void, talking to a dead line the same way he talked to a dead line the night Rose died.
The irony isn’t lost on me. It’s just not funny.
“Bex.” His voice is low. Controlled. Giving away nothing. “What are you doing here?”
“Buying feed. What does it look like?”
A beat.
The clerk behind the counter is pretending very hard to be interested in something on the computer screen.
Small-town radar.
Within the hour, theentirepopulation of Sharp will know that Lee Simms and Bex Dalton were seen together at Holcomb’s, and the speculation will be insufferable.
“I mean in Sharp,” he says. “What are you doing in Sharp?”
“You’d know the answer to that if you’d answered your phone in the last five and a half years.”
Direct hit. I see it land—a flicker in those flat eyes, a hairline fracture in the armor.
He covers it fast, but not fast enough. I’ve always been able to read people.
It’s the superpower you develop when you grow up in a house where reading the room meant the difference between a quiet night and a bad one.
I learned to track micro-expressions the way other kids learned to ride bikes.
Lee Simms has never been hard to read.
He just thinks he is.
“Earl’s sick,” I say. No easing into this. No soft blow. He doesn’t deserve soft right now. “Cancer. Stage 3. He’s been in chemo for two months. I called you. I called you when he wasdiagnosed. I called you when he started treatment. I called you on his birthday, on Rose’s birthday, on Christmas. I have left you more voicemails than I can count, Lee, and you didn’t pick up once.”
His face doesn’t change.
But something behind it does—a shifting, a rearrangement, like watching a building take a hit to the foundation.
Earl.
The name does what my name couldn’t.
I see the pain surface, raw and immediate, before he shoves it back down.
“How bad?” His voice is rougher now.
The control is slipping.
“Bad enough that I packed up my life in Amarillo and drove six hours in two days. Bad enough that I’m sleeping in the guest room at his ranch and driving him to chemo twice a week and watching the strongest man I’ve ever known shrink inside his own clothes.” I take a breath. Steady. Hold the line. “Bad enough, Lee.”
He’s quiet for a long time.
The clerk has abandoned all pretense of not listening and is now openly staring at a point slightly to the left of my head, which is the small-town equivalent of pressing your ear to the wall.
