Water line cut at the house. Generator won’t start. Someone was here last night.
I read it twice.
The cold thing that settled in my stomach when I saw Lockhart’s paperwork—the Road Captain thing, the threat-assessment instinct—comes back hard.
Water line. Generator.
While Bex was here, while Earl was alone, while the whole night was consumed by a colicking horse and nobody was watching the perimeter of an old man’s ranch.
I look down at Bex.
Asleep. Exhausted.
Her face in repose is softer than she’d ever let it be while awake—the sharp lines eased, the armor down, the toughness replaced by something that looks like what she might have been if life hadn’t required her to be hard.
She’s going to wake up and find out that while she was in this barn saving a horse and cracking open her grief and letting me hold her hand, someone was at Earl’s ranch cutting water lines.
Someone was sending a message to a sick old man in an empty house.
Someone was tightening the vise while she wasn’t looking.
I ease her off my shoulder.
She stirs but doesn’t wake—the bone-deep exhaustion of a woman who’s been running on empty for weeks finally overriding her vigilance.
I stand. Check the mare—stable, resting, gut sounds strong. Good.
I pull my phone out. Open the group text. Shadow. Phantom. The officers and full patches.
Need church. Today. Lockhart situation is escalating. Earl’s ranch.
Phantom responds in forty seconds:
10 AM. Chapel. Full table.
I put the phone away.
Look at Bex one more time—sleeping on the barn floor, hay in her hair, the bandage on her hand fraying, her face tipped toward the stall where the mare she helped save is breathing easy.
Nobody’s taking that ranch from Earl.
Nobody’s putting that look on Bex’s face—the exhausted, cornered, doing-it-alone look she wears when she thinks no one’s watching.
She’s not alone anymore. She’s just not awake yet to know it.
I pull a horse blanket off the rack and lay it over her. Careful. The way you cover something precious.
Then I go make coffee, and wait for church.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bex
Something changed on that barn floor.
Not a big, dramatic shift—not a declaration or a conversation or a moment where he looks at me and says I’m done fighting this.
Nothing so clean.
