I hear her truck in the driveway. Hear the door slam.
Then she’s in the house—dark hair wild, mascara wrecked, hands shaking so hard she can’t get her jacket off.
She’s still wearing what she wore to the restaurant.
The restaurant where she sat for two hours waiting for a woman who was never coming.
She sees me. She sees Earl.
Her face crumbles and rebuilds and crumbles again, and through the wreckage of it comes the sentence that will define the next five years of both our lives:
“She was coming to see me.”
I look at her.
Bex Dalton.
Rose’s best friend since they were eight years old.
Dark where Rose was light.
Loud where Rose was soft.
Built like a woman who bends iron for a living, nothing like my wife’s willowy frame.
She’s standing in my living room with Rose’s absence screaming between us, and something ugly flickers through my grief—irrational, poison-tipped, unfair.
She was on that road because of you.
I don’t say it.
I will never say it.
But it’s there, and Bex sees it in my eyes the way she’s always been able to read people—too sharp, too observant, the girl who grew up watching for danger in her own house.
She flinches like I hit her.
Earl pulls her in. Holds her.
She sobs into his chest—the broken, ragged crying of someone who’s lost the person they loved most in the world.
I should comfort her.
I should tell her it’s not her fault, that the rain killed Rose, that the road killed Rose, that God or fate or some broken piece of physics killed Rose.
Not the dinner plans. Not the woman who made them.
I should be better than the thing grief is turning me into.
I can’t.
I walk outside and stand on the porch.
The rain stopped sometime before dawn but the world is still dripping, everything oversaturated and raw.
I look down at my left hand. The gold wedding band catches the early light.
I close my fist around it.
