Slow. Careful.
The effort of standing for three minutes has cost him more than he’ll show.
“He’ll be back,” I say.
“I know.”
“He’s not going to stop.”
“I know that too.” Earl looks out at the land—his land, his father’s land, the land where Rose took her first steps and rode her first horse and picked wildflowers for the kitchen table. “But neither am I.”
I sit on the porch step and press my back against the post.
The casserole dish is warm in my lap and the bandage on my hand is warm against my palm and the evening is coming on golden and slow, the way Texas evenings do when they’re not in a hurry to end.
Earl’s ranch. Earl’s cancer. Earl’s horses.
Lockhart’s patience. The club’s rescues.
The bay’s hooves.
Lee’s hands on my hand, his ring against my wrist, that two-second look that I’m going to carry around like a shard of glass in my pocket for the rest of the week.
I’m handling everything.
That’s what I do.
That’s what I’ve always done.
You put your head down and you work and you hold the pieces together because nobody else is going to do it for you.
But the pieces are getting heavier.
And the thing I’m not handling—the thing I can’t shove into a box and sit on—is the memory of Lee’s thumb on my palm and the look on his face when he forgot, for thirty seconds, that he’s not allowed to touch me.
I press my bandaged hand against my thigh.
I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
I don’t know who I’m apologizing to.
The dead girl. The living man. Myself.
All three, probably.
CHAPTER FIVE
Banshee
I drive out to Earl’s ranch on a Sunday.
I tell myself it’s because Sunday is the only day without obligations—no club runs, no rescue operation duties, no farrier appointments that put Bex ten feet away from me for hours at a time.
Sunday is mine. Quiet.
A man and his truck and the empty roads of the country, where the speed limit is a suggestion and the horizon goes on forever.
But that’s not why I picked Sunday, and I know it.
