"I need to explain?—"
"You need to get inside this fucking house right now." His voice doesn't rise. It drops. Lower, quieter, the register I remember from the night he told me he was going tomake it right—the voice that means the decision is made and the only thing left is the execution. "You and I are going to have a conversation, and it's not going to happen in this yard where my ranch hands can hear it."
I follow him inside.
Because that's the thing about Harlan Lyle.
You follow.
Even when you're terrified.
Even when you know the conversation waiting on the other side of that door is going to break you open.
Even when every survival instinct you've spent years building is screaming at you to get in the car and drive and keep driving until Texas is a memory again.
You follow, because you owe him that much.
Because you owe him twenty years and a daughter and every moment in between, and following him through a door is the smallest payment you can make on a debt that has no ceiling.
The screen door closes behind me.
And I am back in Sharp, Texas. Back on Lyle land. Back in the orbit of the only man I've ever loved who I was too afraid to keep.
God help me.
CHAPTER THREE
Phantom
The screen door slams behind her and the sound ricochets through the house like a gunshot.
I keep walking.
Through the front hall, past the photographs on the wall that I stopped seeing years ago—my father on horseback, my grandparents on the porch, Shiver and Grace and Dakota as kids in matching Christmas pajamas that Jolene insisted on every year.
Past the kitchen where the coffee maker is still warm from this morning, when the biggest problem I had was unfamiliar bikes on County Road 112.
That was twelve hours ago, which feels like a lifetime ago.
I walk into the living room and stop at the bar cart, pour two fingers of Maker's Mark because if I'm going to have this conversation, I need something in my hands that isn't her throat.
Marlena is behind me.
I can hear her breathing—uneven, shallow, the breathing of a woman who drove three hundred miles on adrenaline and is crashing now that she's stopped moving.
She's standing just inside the doorway.
Not sitting. Not moving further into the room.
Hovering in the threshold like she's not sure she's allowed in, which is ironic, because she walked onto my ranch and into my life without permission twenty-one years ago and did the same thing today.
"Sit down."
"I'd rather?—"
"I don't care what you'd rather do. Sit the fuck down."
She sits. The leather chair across from the couch, the one nobody uses because it faces the window and the afternoon sun makes it too hot.
