Calloused. Strong.
Her fingers tighten around mine immediately—a grip that says don’t you dare let go in a language that doesn’t need words.
We sit on the barn floor and hold hands and cry.
Not together—my tears are silent too, the kind that happen behind closed eyes, the kind I haven’t let fall in years—but beside each other.
Two people who loved the same woman, finally grieving in the same room for the first time since the funeral.
The ring presses between our interlocked fingers.
I can feel it—cool gold against her warm skin, Rose’s ring touching Rose’s best friend.
And for the first time, it doesn’t feel like a wall.
It feels like a bridge.
Like Rose is the thing connecting us instead of the thing keeping us apart.
The mare sighs in her stall.
A deep, contented sound.
The sound of a living thing that came through the worst of it and is going to be okay.
I don’t let go of Bex’s hand.
Not when the tears stop.
Not when the breathing steadies.
Not when the exhaustion finally wins and her head drops against my shoulder, heavy and trusting, and the weight of it—the physical, literal weight of this woman leaning on me—is the first thing that’s felt like enough in five and a half years.
Her head on my shoulder. Her hand in mine.
The barn is quiet. The mare is breathing. The first gray light of dawn touches the windows.
I don’t sleep, but I close my eyes.
And for the first time in years, the dark behind my eyelids doesn’t sound like a car crash.
It sounds like breathing.
Hers and mine and the horse’s, three sets of lungs moving in the slow rhythm of something that survived.
My phone buzzes at a few minutes before six.
Bex is asleep against my shoulder.
I ease my hand free—carefully, slowly, the way you move around a sleeping thing you don’t want to wake—and check the screen.
Bex’s name.
But it’s not a call from her phone—it’s a text.
From her phone. Which is in her pocket, which is against my thigh, which means someone else is using it.
Earl.
