She turns toward him.
Takes a step. Another. He waits.
She stretches her neck, nostrils reaching, and touches his chest with her muzzle.
He lifts one hand.
Slow—so slow you’d miss it if you blinked and rests it on the side of her face.
She doesn’t pull away.
His fingers curl gently against her jaw and he stands there with a horse’s head in his hand, and his face?—
His face is the face Rose fell in love with.
Not the hard, shuttered version I’ve been dealing with.
Not the flat-eyed, jaw-set, don’t-touch-me wall he puts up for the rest of the world.
This is the other one.
The one underneath—soft around the eyes, mouth slightly open, something patient and tender and aching in the way he holds the mare’s face, like she’s the most fragile thing he’s ever touched and he’s terrified of breaking her.
I see it.
I see the man my best friend loved, the man who used to light up a room just by walking into it, the man who answered on the first ring because he thought it was a privilege.
He’s still in there.
Buried under years of grief and silence and walls so thick you’d need dynamite to get through them, but he’s in there.
Standing in a round pen at dawn with his hand on a rescue horse’s face, being the man he won’t let himself be for anyone else.
Something breaks in my chest. Not the sharp, sudden kind—the slow kind.
The fracture that’s been spreading for years, invisible, structural, and just needed one more point of pressure to give way.
I press my fist against the steering wheel and breathe through it and absolutely do not cry over a man I have no business crying over.
Rose, if you can hear me. Your husband still has the softest hands in Texas. He just forgot he’s allowed to use them on people.
I drink my coffee and wait until I can trust my face.
Then I start the truck, pull forward, and let the diesel announce me the way God intended.
The first week went fine.
Cold, professional, efficient. I showed up, I worked the horses, I kept my mouth shut about anything that wasn’t related to hooves and trimming schedules.
Lee kept his distance.
Spoke to me in short, clipped sentences stripped of everything personal.
We moved around each other like magnets turned wrong-side—close enough to function, careful enough to never touch.
The second week, the cracks start showing.
Not in him. In me.
