As though being the husband entitled me to a monopoly on the loss.
As though Earl’s shattered life and Bex’s shattered life were secondary to mine because I was the one who heard her die.
“Her father lost his child,” Bex says. Each word deliberate. Each one a stone laid in a wall she’s been building for years. “I lost my sister. The only person who ever made me feel like I belonged somewhere. And you just… disappeared. You took your grief and you walked away and you left the rest of us to holdthe pieces without you. Earl needed you. He needed his son. I needed?—”
She stops. Catches herself. Looks away.
The unfinished sentence hangs between us, and I know what the end of it is because I can feel it in the space she left.
I needed you too.
I needed the one other person who loved her like I did.
I needed someone to grieve with and you shut the door and wouldn’t let me in.
“I know,” I say. My voice is quiet. Stripped of everything except the truth. “I know I disappeared. I know I left you both. I don’t have a reason that’s good enough. I just… couldn’t. Being around anyone who loved her felt like drowning. Like being held underwater by the weight of all the things I couldn’t fix. So I went somewhere it was quiet and I stayed there.”
“For five and a half years?”
“Yes.”
She looks at me again.
I let her. Let her see whatever’s on my face—the shame, the grief, the wrecked landscape of a man who knows he failed the people who mattered.
Her expression is hard but not closed.
Angry but not cruel.
She’s looking at me the way she looks at a horse with bad feet—assessing the damage, calculating whether anything can be salvaged.
“You’re here now,” she says finally. Grudging. Like the words cost her something.
“I’m here now.”
“Don’t disappear again.” Not a request. A condition.
A line drawn in the dirt between us—cross it and I’m done with you.
“I won’t.”
She holds my eyes for one more beat, then she nods.
Earl comes back and settles into his rocker with the careful movements of a man managing pain he won’t name.
He looks at us and says nothing. He doesn’t need to.
Earl has spent a lifetime reading horses and people and weather, and he knows the look of two storms deciding whether to collide.
I’m getting ready to leave—keys in hand, boots on the porch step—when Bex comes out of the house with a handful of papers.
Not the shop rag and apron.
Official papers.
The kind that come in county envelopes with seals and stamps and the bureaucratic language that sounds reasonable until you realize it’s a weapon.
“Lee.” She stops me at the truck. Holds the papers out. Her jaw is set in that way I’m learning means she’s holding back something she’d rather spit. “Look at this.”
