It wasn’t just grief.
It wasn’t just checking on me.
It was guilt.
The same guilt I carry—the if-only, the what-if, the unbearable weight of a choice that seemed like nothing at the time and turned out to be everything.
“I thought you blamed me,” she says. Quiet. Raw. “For over five years, Lee. Every call you didn’t answer, I thought it was because you looked at me and saw the woman who put Rose on that road.”
The truth of it hits me hard.
Because she’s not wrong—not entirely.
That flicker at the funeral.
The irrational, grief-poisoned thought that I shoved down and sealed over and never examined because examining it would mean admitting I’d assigned blame where none belonged.
I looked at Bex and thought she was coming to see you, and then I spent five years not answering her calls, and she spent five years believing the silence was a verdict.
“I didn’t blame you.” My voice is rough. Wrecked. “I—there was a second. One second, at the funeral, where my brain went somewhere ugly. But it wasn’t real, Bex. It was grief looking for a target because the real target was a wet road and bad luck and the fact that I told her to drive safe like those words meant anything at all.”
“Then why didn’t you answer?”
Because your voice reminded me of her.
Because you were the last person she was going to see and that made you the closest thing to her last breath.
Because every time your name lit up my phone I was back on that highway, hearing the sounds, feeling Shadow’s arms pinning me to the truck.
Because ignoring you was easier than facing the fact that we were the only two people who loved her the way we did and being in the same room as that shared grief would have broken whatever was left of me.
I say all of it. Every word.
The first time in my life I’ve given someone the unedited version of what’s inside me, and it comes out in the dark, on a barn floor, sitting shoulder to shoulder with the woman my dead wife loved most in the world.
Bex is crying.
Silently.
Not the dramatic kind—the quiet kind, the kind that leaks out of the corners of your eyes when you’ve been holding something for so long that it finds its own way out.
Tears tracking down her cheeks in the low barn light, dripping off her jaw.
She doesn’t wipe them.
Doesn’t hide them.
Just lets them fall, the way a woman who was raised to be tough sometimes runs out of tough and what’s left is just the truth.
I reach over and take her hand.
I don’t think about it.
Don’t plan it.
I just reach over and wrap my fingers around hers and hold on.
Her hand is warm.
