Tonight, I'd go out past the fence line with the rifle I'd built two months ago in a workshop outside Fayetteville. Custom bolt-action, .308 Winchester chambered for subsonic rounds. Suppressor machined to my exact specifications, threaded and fitted so the sound signature was nothing more than a whisper and a cough. I'd sit in the blind my brothers and I had constructed when we were teenagers—plywood and corrugated metal hidden in a cluster of juniper—and I'd wait for the coyotes that still prowled the edges of the property, testing boundaries.
They came every night. Looking for weak spots. Seeing what they could take.
I'd kill them.
Not because it mattered. Not because the Cuthberts couldn't handle it themselves. But because it was the only thing I knew how to do for this place anymore.
Protect it from a distance.
Kill the predators my father would've killed if he were still here.
Prove that I hadn't completely abandoned everything he'd taught me, even if I'd abandoned everything else.
Tomorrow, I'd drive to the care facility in Marfa—an hour west through empty desert that looked like the surface of another planet. I'd sit across from my mother in a room that smelled like disinfectant and overcooked vegetables, and I'd tell her about things she'd never remember. Early onset Alzheimer's had taken her five years ago—slowly at first, then all at once, like watching someone fade in reverse. She'd fought it with the same quiet strength she'd brought to everything, but the disease didn't care about strength.
It didn't care about anything.
We'd moved her to the best facility we could find when it became clear she couldn't stay on the ranch. The Cuthberts had offered to help. To keep her close. To look after her the way she'd looked after them for decades—with casseroles and kindness and the kind of steady presence that made people feel seen.
But we couldn't ask that of them.
So, we sent her to strangers. Professional, kind strangers who knew how to manage her medications and her confusion and the moments when she didn't know her own name or recognize the faces of her sons.
Another failure we paid for in monthly checks.
I exhaled slowly, letting the weight settle back into my chest where it lived most days, familiar as a scar. The sun was sinking lower now, the sky bleeding orange and pink and purple across the canyon, colors too beautiful for what they were illuminating.
It was beautiful. This place.
It always had been.
But beauty didn't fix anything. Didn't bring anyone back. Didn't make the land feel like home again.
Didn't make me any less of a coward for sitting here instead of walking down that hill.
I started the truck, the engine breaking the silence like a fist through glass. The sound felt violent after so much quiet.
I didn't look back as I drove away.
There was work to do. Coyotes to kill. A mother to visit who wouldn't know my face but might remember my voice, if I was lucky.
And after that, I'd leave again. Go back to the only life that made sense anymore—the one where I built things that solved problems, where my hands had purpose, where the enemy was clear and the mission was simple.
Out here, nothing was simple.
Out here, the enemy was memory, and memory couldn't be killed with a rifle or a breaching charge or anything I knew how to build.
Out here, I was just a man who couldn't go home.
So, I'd protect it from the canyon's edge and call that enough.
Because it had to be.
Because I didn't know how to do anything else.
3
SOPHIE
