The crack in the foundation. The pain he couldn’t hide fast enough.
“He heard me,” I say. Which is more than I’ve been able to say in years.
Earl squeezes the top of my head gently and takes his hand back.
We sit in the quiet—the old man in the rocker and the woman on the step, looking out at the land that raised them both, listening to the horses move in the barn and the wind in the oaks and the particular silence of a place where someone is missing.
Two empty chairs at the table.
Rose’s.
And Lee’s.
I came back to fill one of them.
Whether he fills the other is his choice.
I’m done calling.
CHAPTER THREE
Banshee
I last three days before I drive myself insane.
Three days of knowing Bex Dalton is in Sharp.
Three days of knowing Earl is sick.
Three days of turning both facts over in my head like rocks I can’t stop touching even though the edges cut every time.
I haven’t gone to see Earl.
I should. I know I should.
The man was a father to me—not in the sentimental, Hallmark-card way, but in the real way, the way that counts.
He taught me to shoe a horse before he taught me to shake hands.
Sat me down at his kitchen table when I asked for Rose’s hand and said, “She chose you. Don’t make me regret letting her.”
Stood beside me at the funeral and didn’t say a word because he was burying his only child and words were the most useless thing on earth.
Five and a half years of silence.
Five and a half years of letting an old man wonder if the son-in-law who used to come for Sunday dinners was alive or dead.
I didn’t call. Didn’t visit. Didn’t answer when Bex tried to bridge the gap.
I just… stopped.
Withdrew into the compound and the horses and the numb, airless space I’d built for myself, because going to Earl’s ranch meant driving the roads Rose drove, sitting in the kitchen where Rose cooked, looking at the barn where I proposed to her on one knee in the hay dust with Earl’s best mare watching like a witness.
Every piece of that place is a piece of her.
I couldn’t go back without drowning in it.
So, I didn’t go back.
