Asks Bex about the client horse she was shoeing.
Tells me about the paint mare’s sore foot.
Normal things. Safe things.
The kind of talk that happens on ranches every day, designed to keep the silence from becoming something bigger than the people in it.
Bex answers in short, efficient sentences.
Competent. Controlled. But I can feel the tension in her like a wire stretched taut—she’s holding herself together with the same rigid discipline she brings to everything, and I know she’s doing it because the alternative is the thing neither of us can afford.
Not here. Not in front of Earl.
I’m doing it too.
Keeping my voice even. Keeping my eyes on the middle distance.
Not looking at the soot on her forearms or the way the flush from the forge is still coloring her throat or the strip of skin below her collarbone where her shirt has shifted and?—
Not looking.
Earl excuses himself to use the bathroom.
He moves slowly.
Bex rises to help but he waves her off with the look of a man who will walk to the bathroom under his own power or die trying.
The screen door closes behind him.
And then it’s just us.
The porch. The failing light. The sound of horses in the barn and the last birds calling before dark.
Bex on the step. Me in the chair. Four feet of charged air between us.
She doesn’t look at me at first.
She picks at the rag in her hands, pulls at a loose thread, and then quietly speaks up. “You came.”
“Yeah.”
“It took you long enough.”
“I know.”
“It should have taken you three days. Three hours. It should have taken you hearing the word ‘cancer’ in a feed store and driving straight here without stopping.” Her voice is low. Level. More controlled than anger, which makes it worse.
Anger I can deflect.
This—this precise, measured accounting of my failures—goes straight through.
“You’re right.”
“IknowI’m right.” She turns to face me. Those dark eyes. Unwavering. “You weren’t the only one who lost her, Lee.”
The words land like a blade between the ribs—not because they’re cruel, but because they’re true.
And I’ve spent years acting as though my grief was the only grief that mattered.
