The screen door opens.
Bex comes around the corner of the house, wiping her hands on a shop rag, her leather apron slung over one shoulder.
She’s flushed from the forge—heat in her cheeks, sweat darkening the edges of her braid, forearms streaked with soot.
She stops when she sees me.
For a second—just a second—something crosses her face that isn’t anger or wariness or the professional neutrality we’ve been trading for the past couple of weeks.
It’s surprise, then relief, then a third thing she covers so fast I almost miss it.
Something that looks like hope and hurts to witness.
Then the mask goes on.
The Bex mask.
The one that says I’m fine, I’m tough, I don’t need anything from anyone.
I’m beginning to recognize it the way I recognize the bay horse’s defensive posture.
The stance of a creature that learned early to look bigger than it feels.
“Lee.”
“Bex.”
Earl looks between us with the weary patience of a man who has watched too many stubborn animals refuse to drink from the same trough.
“Sit down, Bex,” he says. “You’ve been at that forge for three hours.”
She hesitates.
I can feel the calculation—stay or go, face this or avoid it.
She looks at Earl, and whatever she sees there makes the decision for her.
She drops the apron on the porch rail and sits on the top step, across from me.
Close enough to touch if either of us were the kind of person who reached for things that might burn them.
We’re not.
So we sit with Earl between us and the ghost of Rose filling every inch of space we leave empty.
The three of us.
The same configuration as a thousand Sunday dinners, minus the one person who made it make sense.
The absence is so loud it has a sound—a low, constant hum beneath the conversation and the birdsong and the wind in the oaks. Rose should be here.
Rose should be bringing iced tea and telling some story about a kid in her class and touching my shoulder as she passes my chair and laughing at something Bex said.
Rose should be the center of this, the way she was always the center, and instead there’s a gap where she used to be that none of us know how to fill.
Earl carries the conversation because Earl has always been the one to carry things when the rest of us can’t.
He talks about the horses.
