I didn’t ask what this meant. I already knew.
“I know.”
“I’m going to need space. And I don’t know what that looks like yet.”
“I know.”
Her eyes softened, just a little. “You make it hard to walk away.”
I held her gaze. “That’s not a reason to stay.”
She exhaled, long and shaky. “No. It’s not.”
At the door, she paused, hand on the handle, and looked back at me one last time.
“Thank you,” she said, and this time she meant something different.
I nodded once. Let her go.
The door closed behind her with the same quiet finality as the night she’d come home shaken and broken but alive.
I stood there long after she was gone, the brewery breathing around me again, knowing with bone-deep certainty that this wasn’t the end.
Thirty-Nine
Tessa
The house was quiet with no Dani roaming around at all hours. Just the soft settling of old boards and the faint, constant hum of the fridge, like it was trying to pretend life was still normal.
I spread the paperwork across Ray’s kitchen table.
It wasn’t one stack. It was five. Bank notices with their polite threats. Tax arrears that didn’t care about funerals. Statements with numbers that didn’t feel real until I read them twice, and my stomach tightened like I swallowed a fist. Equipment loan forms. Letters I hadn’t opened until now because I’d been clinging to the lie that if I didn’t look, it wouldn’t be there.
I sat down hard, the chair scraping against the floor, and stared at the pages in front of me until the words blurred.
My hands didn’t shake anymore. That was the scary part. Something in me had gone still, like a lake after a storm when everything sinks to the bottom, and you can’t tell what’s alive and what’s drowned.
I opened one envelope over, then another, then another,making myself read the dates like they were facts and not accusations.
Past due.
Final notice.
Recovery.
I swallowed, and it scraped.
“Okay,” I said out loud, because if I didn’t speak, I was going to disappear. “Okay, Ray. Here’s where we’re at.”
My voice sounded wrong in the empty kitchen. Too small for the weight of what I laid out. I pressed my palm flat to the table, feeling the grooves in the wood, the nicks and scratches he’d never bothered sanding down because work mattered more than pretty.
The coffee mug Dani left sat near the sink. Pink lipstick on the rim, proof that someone had been here to hold me together for a couple of days, and then had gone back to a life that didn’t revolve around my grief and my ranch falling apart.
I couldn’t blame her.
I couldn’t even blame myself.
I could blame Ray, though. Just a little. Enough to keep breathing.
