I consider her words, the way I consider a horse that’s spooked but not broken.
“You don’t have to know right now,” I say. “This isn’t a race.”
Her shoulders ease a fraction.
“And,” I add, “you don’t have to do it alone.”
She blinks. “Marshall?—”
“I mean it,” I cut in gently. “Whatever this turns out to be. Digging. Reading. Sorting truth from rumor. If you want help… you’ve got it.”
Her eyes soften, disbelief flickering there. “You would?”
“Yeah,” I say simply. “We would.”
She swallows hard. “Why?”
I decide to say it. The words out loud. The thing I never normally tell anyone.
“My brother,” I say. “Luke.”
Her eyes lift to me immediately. Fully now.
“He died young,” I continue. Don’t dress it up. “Accident. One second, everything was fine. The next… it wasn’t.”
I drag my thumb along my knee, feeling the grit there.
“For a long time,” I say, “I figured if I’d been faster, louder, smarter… if I’d done anything different, he’d still be here.” I huff out a breath. “Spent years carrying that like it was my job.”
Abilene’s watching me the way you watch someone crossing thin ice.
“People talked about him like he was reckless,” I go on. “Like he pushed too hard and paid for it. And part of me… I let that stick. Because if it was his fault, or mine, then at least it made sense.”
Her brow furrows. “But it didn’t.”
“No,” I say. “It just hurt.”
I stare out at the pasture, the grass pale and stubborn and still alive anyway.
“He loved this place,” I say quietly. “Everything he did was about keeping it going. About making sure the ranch didn’t die with the old generation. He wasn’t chasing danger. He was chasing a future.”
I swallow.
“I’m trying now,” I add. “Trying to let go of the idea that love failing is the same thing as love being wrong. Trying to believe that one bad ending doesn’t erase all the good intent that came before it.”
Abilene’s breath shudders.
“That sounds… really hard,” she says.
“It is,” I admit. Then, honest as I know how to be: “But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life punishing myself for something I couldn’t control.”
She nods slowly. “My mom gets talked about like that too. Like her mistakes matter more than her reasons.”
I meet her eyes.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what people do when they don’t know how to sit with grief. They shrink it down. Blame someone. Anyone. Makes it easier to live with.”
The bees hum steadily around us.
