I loved her.
I loved her so completely that there isn’t a version of me that exists without her.
Every good thing I am, every soft thing, every part of me that learned how to be gentle—she built that.
She walked into my life and opened every door I’d nailed shut and filled the rooms with light, and now she’s gone and the doors are slamming closed one by one and the lights are going out and I can’t stop it.
I can hear Earl crying inside.
I can hear Bex.
I can hear the absence of Rose’s laughter like a frequency that’s been cut from the world.
I make a vow. Quiet. Internal. The kind that settles into bone.
Never again.
I loved her, and it’s killing me.
Once was enough.
I don’t take the ring off.
I won’t ever take it off.
CHAPTER ONE
Banshee
Present Day…
The bay doesn’t trust me yet.
That’s fine. I’m not in a hurry.
It’s a quarter past five in the morning and I’m sitting on an overturned bucket outside the quarantine stall with a cup of coffee going cold between my boots.
Haven’t moved in forty minutes.
Haven’t spoken.
Haven’t done anything except exist in this animal’s space and let it decide what that means.
The horse is pressed against the far wall.
Quarter horse, maybe five or six years old, though it’s hard to tell with the ones that come in like this.
Ribby. Scars across the left shoulder where someone used something they shouldn’t have.
Hooves cracked and flared so badly I could see the neglect from twenty feet away when we unloaded him off the trailer yesterday.
He’s standing with his weight shifted off the front left, which means there’s pain in there—abscess, rotation, something deepand structural that’s been wrong for a long time and nobody bothered to fix.
Kill pen horse.
Forty-eight hours from a slaughterhouse in Mexico before I pulled him.
He was standing in a feedlot ankle-deep in mud with thirty other horses, head down, ribs showing, not fighting anymore.
