Because it’s three in the morning and we’re in a barn after a crisis, and the only honest thing to do is sit beside the person who went through it with you and stop pretending you don’t want them there.
She smells like sweat and horse and cold air and the iron undertone that never fully leaves a farrier’s skin.
Her shoulder is solid against mine.
Her breathing is slow, deep, the decompression of adrenaline leaving the body.
We sit in the quiet and listen to the mare breathe.
I don’t know which one of us speaks first.
Maybe it’s the exhaustion.
“I was on the phone with her,” I say.
The words come out flat.
Quiet.
Like a confession delivered to a wall.
I don’t look at Bex.
I look at the barn aisle stretching out in front of us, the overhead lights turned low, the shadows between stalls.
“When she crashed. I was on the phone. We were talking. Just—regular stuff. She was telling me about a kid in her class. She was laughing.”
Beside me, Bex has gone completely still.
“She said she was almost to the restaurant. Meeting you. I told her to drive safe, and she laughed and said—” My voice catches. I push through it because if I stop I won’t start again. “She said, ‘I know how to drive in the rain, Lee.’ And I could hear her smiling. You know how you can hear someone smile through the phone?”
Bex doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to. She knows.
“Then the tires. That sound—when rubber loses traction on wet pavement, it’s not a screech, it’s more like a hum. A vibration. And then her breath. She caught her breath. I think she said my name but I’m not sure because the next thing was?—”
Metal. Glass.
The sounds that live in the foundation of my nightmares, that wake me in the middle of the night, that have colonized a part of my brain I can’t access during daylight without the walls going up.
“The line didn’t go dead.” My voice is barely there now. A rasp. “That’s the part nobody tells you. In movies, the phone cuts out. Clean. Over. In reality, the connection held. I heard?—”
I stop.
There are things I heard that I’m not going to say.
Not to Bex, not to anyone, not ever.
Some sounds belong only to the person who carried them.
Some sounds would do more damage in the telling than in the keeping.
“I was screaming her name,” I say instead. “The brothers came outside. Shadow took the phone, listened, then grabbed his keys. He drove because I couldn’t—my hands were—” I look down at them. The ring catches the barn light. “I couldn’t hold anything. Couldn’t grip. Like my body just… stopped working from the hands out.
“By the time we got there, the coroner was already—” I swallow. “They wouldn’t let me see her. Shadow had to hold me back. Physically. He pinned me against the truck and held me there while I?—”
While I came apart.
While the man I used to be disintegrated on the shoulder of a rural Texas highway in the rain, held together by nothing except the arms of his best friend and the gold band on his finger.
