Shadow is the biggest human being I’ve ever been near, and the gentlest, which is a combination that would be confusing if I hadn’t spent my whole life around horses and learned that the biggest ones are usually the calmest.
“He tell you?” I ask. Not looking up.
“He didn’t have to. I know what he looks like when he’s fighting himself.” Shadow leans against the truck. Arms crossed. “I’ve been watching him do it for longer than I can remember.”
“So what do I do?”
“Exactly what you’re doing. Don’t chase. Don’t push. Don’t leave.” He looks at me sideways. “He’s not punishing you, Bex. He’s punishing himself. There’s a difference.”
I know the difference.
I grew up in a house where punishment was random and personal.
What Lee’s doing isn’t that.
It’s the self-imposed exile of a man who touched fire and is now trying to convince himself he didn’t feel the heat.
“He loved her,” Shadow says. Simple. “And the guilt of wanting someone new—especially someone connected to her—that’s not a wall you break down. It’s one he has to take down himself. Brick by brick. All you can do is be there when the dust settles.”
I close my toolbox. Latch it. My hands are steady. The rest of me is not.
“What if the dust doesn’t settle?”
Shadow is quiet for a moment. “It will. I know him. He doesn’t do anything halfway—not grief, not loyalty, and not whatever he’s feeling about you. He’s just not ready to call it what it is yet.”
He pushes off the truck. Squeezes my shoulder once—brief, solid, the same way he’d steady a brother. Then he walks back toward the clubhouse.
I stand by my rig and watch the man who knows Lee better than anyone alive walk away, and I think about dust settling, and brick walls, and the taste of coffee and rain on a man’s mouth during a storm.
Earl calls me around ten at night.
I’m at his place—I’m always at his place, I live in his guest bedroom now—but I’m in the barn doing inventory when my phone rings.
His voice is strange.
Flat in a way that means he’s controlling it.
“Come to the house. Bring a flashlight.”
I go.
Earl is on the porch in his boots and a jacket, which he shouldn’t be wearing because it’s fifty degrees and his immune system is tissue paper.
He’s looking at the east pasture.
“The cattle are out,” he says.
My stomach drops. “What?”
“I heard them on the road. Got up to check. East fence is down. Cut.” He looks at me. Those blue eyes, Rose’s eyes, bright with anger and fatigue and something that looks like fear but that Earl would never call by that name. “Clean cuts. Wire cutters. Four sections.”
Not weather. Not rot. Not an animal pushing through.
Deliberate. Surgical.
Four sections of fence cut so the cattle would drift out of the pasture, across the bar ditch, and onto the county road.
I’m already moving.
