I get in my truck while she stands in the driveway.
I pull out, and in the rearview I see her still standing there, watching my taillights fade down the road Earl’s grandfather drove when the deed was new and the land was full of promise.
Halfway home, I realize I’m gripping the steering wheel with both hands and the papers in my back pocket feel like a promise I’m not sure I’m ready to keep but am going to keep anyway.
Because that’s what you do.
You show up.
Even when it’s years too late.
Even when the shame of how long it took is eating you alive.
You show up and you do the work and you don’t disappear again.
CHAPTER SIX
Bex
The weather shifts.
I feel it before I see it—a drop in pressure, a restlessness in the horses, the way the air goes thick and still like it’s holding its breath.
I’m in the quarantine barn finishing corrective work on the older gelding when the first line of dark cloud crests the western ridgeline, and something in my chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with the weather.
Texas storms don’t sneak up.
They announce themselves—a wall of charcoal eating the sky from the horizon in, the kind of darkness that makes noon look like dusk.
The wind shifts.
The temperature drops ten degrees in fifteen minutes.
The horses know before the radar does.
Every head in the pasture comes up, ears forward, nostrils wide.
I know what’s coming because I grew up in this.
I know the color of a sky that’s about to come apart.
I know the smell—ozone and dust and the metallic tang of electricity building in the atmosphere.
I know that the tight, airless stillness before a country thunderstorm is the most dangerous kind of quiet, because what follows it is never quiet at all.
Lee knows too.
He’s already moving through the barn, checking stalls, securing latches, pulling horses in from the near pasture.
He moves fast but not frantic—the calm, methodical efficiency of a man who’s weathered a hundred of these.
His voice is low and steady when he talks to the horses, his hands sure on halters and lead ropes and the big sliding door that he muscles shut against the first hard gust of wind.
We haven’t talked about anything real since his visit to Earl’s four days ago.
We’ve talked about horses. Feed schedules. The gelding’s trim angles. The bay’s progress—Lee’s been working on hoof handling, getting the horse to accept having his feet held, and the results are better than either of us expected.
Small conversations. Professional conversations.
