The compound moves around us—a prospect washing bikes, two brothers working on a fence section, the distant sound of a horse blowing in the barn.
Normal life.
The kind of ordinary I’ve leaned on like a crutch for years, especially since Rose’s death.
“Harder isn’t always worse,” Phantom says.
He doesn’t elaborate. Just claps my shoulder and walks inside.
I stand there holding my coffee and feeling like a man who just lost an argument he never had a chance of winning.
She shows up Thursday morning.
I hear the rig before I see it—a heavy diesel pulling onto the compound, the particular rumble and rattle of a farrier’s truck loaded with anvil and forge and the hundred pounds of tools that make the work possible.
I’m in the barn with the bay, sitting on my bucket, and the sound reaches me through the open doors like an advancing weather front.
I don’t go out to meet her.
I stay where I am, in the dim quiet of the quarantine stall, and let someone else handle the welcome.
Shadow, probably.
Or Grace.
The people with functional social skills who don’t turn to stone at the sound of a woman’s truck in the gravel.
Five minutes. Ten.
I hear voices—Grace’s, warm and professional, and another voice I haven’t heard in person in years.
Lower than Rose’s. Rougher.
Even through the barn walls, even muffled by distance and wood, it does something to the base of my spine.
A recognition. A tightening.
I ignore it.
Footsteps on the barn aisle.
Two sets.
Grace appears first, clipboard in hand, already talking case notes.
Behind her?—
Bex.
She’s dressed for work.
Steel-toed boots, thick denim, a leather farrier’s apron tied at the waist that hangs to mid-thigh.
Her black hair is pulled back in a tight braid that runs down between her shoulder blades.
No jewelry. No makeup. No effort made toward anything except function, and somehow that’s worse than if she’d shown up looking like she was trying, because she’s not trying and she still looks like?—
I shut that down.
