I’m done.
That’s all of it.
The whole story, or as much of it as I can give without reaching the parts that would break something permanently.
I’ve never said it out loud before—not to Shadow, who was there and doesn’t need it repeated.
Not to Phantom.
Not to a therapist or a bartender or a God I stopped believing in on that highway.
I’ve carried it sealed and silent for years, and now I’ve cracked the seal and the air is hitting the wound and it hurts in a way that’s different from the usual hurt.
Sharper. Cleaner.
Like setting a broken bone that healed wrong.
Bex is quiet for a long time.
Then, softly:
“I was at the restaurant for two hours.”
Her voice is barely above a whisper.
I turn my head.
She’s looking straight ahead, the same way I was.
Eyes on the barn aisle.
Hands in her lap.
Her profile in the low light is sharp—the strong jaw, the straight nose, the set of her mouth that usually reads as tough and right now reads as something held together by force of will.
“I got there early,” she says. “Ordered a margarita. Rose’s favorite. Salt on the rim. I was going to get her one, too, but I wanted to wait so it wouldn’t get warm. So I sat there. Drinking mine. Texting her.”
She swallows. The sound is audible in the quiet barn.
“‘Where are you?’ That was the first one. Then, twenty minutes later, ‘Your margarita’s getting warm.’ Except I hadn’t ordered hers yet. It was a joke. It was—” Her voice breaks. Barely. A hairline crack in the armor she welds shut every morning. “It was just a stupid joke. And she was already dead when I sent it. She was already gone, and I was sitting in a booth texting her about a margarita that didn’t exist.”
The pain in her voice is a mirror of mine.
Different angle, different details, same wound.
Two people who loved the same woman, each carrying their own version of the last normal moment before everything shattered.
“She was on that road because of me,” Bex says. The words come out like a stone she’s been carrying in her mouth for five years, finally spat out, finally exposed to air. “I made the plans. Dinner in the next town because I wanted to try the new place. If I’d said ‘let’s just go to the diner in Sharp,’ she would have driven five minutes on a road she knew with her eyes closed instead of forty minutes on a highway in the rain.”
I turn to look at her fully. She won’t meet my eyes.
“That’s why you kept calling,” I say.
Understanding arrives like a wave, slow and total, washing over everything I thought I knew about her persistence.
The years of ignored calls.
The voicemails that went from angry to sad to desperate to resigned.
