I have never been a soft woman.
I was raised by neglect and saved by a dead girl. I have bent iron with my bare hands, and I do not crumble for men who kiss me like I’m the answer and then look at me like I’m the sin.
“I know exactly who she was, Lee.” My voice is steady.
I don’t know how.
I’m shaking from the inside out—my blood is still on fire, my lips are still swollen, I can still taste him—but my voice is a flat line drawn across the chaos. “She was my best friend before she was your wife. I loved her before you knew her name. So don’t you dare stand there and use her to push me away like I don’t have my own grief in this.”
He stares at me.
Something cracks across his expression—not anger, not guilt.
Devastation.
The look of a man who just heard something true and doesn’t know what to do with it.
He leaves the stall. His boots on the aisle. The barn door opening and closing. Rain, then silence.
I stand in the stall with a trembling horse and the ghost of a kiss on my mouth and I press both hands flat against the wall and breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
The way Earl taught me to calm a horse.
The way Rose used to coach me through panic attacks when I was sixteen and the world was too loud.
Breathe. Just breathe.
The bay takes a step toward me.
Then another.
His nose touches my shoulder—the same gesture he gave Lee in the round pen, the tentative reach of a broken thing testing whether another broken thing is safe.
I put my hand on his face.
His skin is warm and damp, and he’s still trembling. So am I.
“Yeah,” I say. To the horse. To Rose. To the empty space where Lee was standing ten seconds ago. “Me too.”
For three days, I don’t hear a damn thing from him.
I come to the ranch after a few other appointments to work the horses.
Now, I’m not only doing the rescue horses, but the regular ranch horses as well.
I’ve finished up all of them, and now I’m in the back barn where the rescues are.
Lee is a ghost—present but absent, occupying the same barn but never the same corner of it.
He doesn’t speak to me beyond single words.
Doesn’t look at me.
Doesn’t stand close enough to breathe the same air.
The wall is back and it’s twice as thick as before, reinforced with whatever he poured into it after he walked out of that stall.
