I knew how it felt.
Rawley’s phone buzzed in his shirt pocket. He fished it out, checked the screen, and answered with a grunt. “Steele,” he barked.
I tried not to listen, but I couldn’t help it. Ever since Carter left, every phone call felt like a potential landmine. My hands tightened on the post driver, knuckles whitening, as Rawley walked down the line with his back to me.
“Yeah,” he was saying, “the irrigation’s holding. We got the new pump installed last week.” A pause. “I said it’s fine, Barrett. If you want to send someone out to check, that’s your call.”
I exhaled slow, letting the tension bleed out through my arms. Barrett. Not Carter. Never Carter.
Rawley’s voice dropped, softer now. “You can tell Dad I don’t need his input. Not today.”
The conversation died. Rawley stared at the phone for a second, thumb running along the edge, then pocketed it like it was loaded. He came back and picked up the next roll of wire. “Family,” he said, as if the word explained everything.
“Never easy,” I offered.
He snorted. “You get along with yours?”
“Don’t have one,” I said, and left it at that.
Rawley didn’t push. He never did. He knew my story more than anyone.
We worked the rest of the line, finishing another fifty feet before the sun cleared the ridge and started baking the frost out of the ground. Sweat rolled down my back, soaking the flannel, and my forearms burned from the weight of the posts.
Good.
I needed to feel something.
At nine, we broke for water. Rawley leaned against the back of the truck, chugging from a battered metal thermos, eyes fixed on nothing.
“You ever think about getting out?” he asked, voice low.
“Out of Montana?” I wiped sweat from my face with the sleeve of my shirt.
“Out of the loop. Out of the rut.” He said it like he was talking to himself, not me.
I shrugged. “Don’t know how. Do you?”
He grinned, quick and sharp. “Nope. Guess that’s the trick.”
We drank in silence, passing the thermos back and forth. The sun was warm now, cutting through the last of the morning’s chill, and for a second it felt like maybe things could be simple.
But then Rawley’s phone buzzed again, this time with a text that made him go stiff.
“Problem?” I asked.
He showed me the screen. Just a string of words:“Board dinner this Friday. Family expects you to be there. Don’t embarrass us.”
I read it twice, then looked up. “You going?”
He shook his head, jaw set. “Not if I can help it. I might have agreed to limited contact with them, but that doesn’t mean I’m headed back to Texas.”
He tossed the phone into the cab and turned back to the fence, but I saw the tension in his shoulders. He worked faster, more violently, as if the wire could hold his problems together if he just pulled it tight enough.
Me, I just kept digging. My hands blistered, then bled, but I didn’t slow down. The pain was good. Real. It was easier to focus on the ache in my palms than the ache in my gut every time I thought about Carter.
He should have been here by now. He promised Rawley he’d stay a whole summer, help with the books, maybe even learn how to back a horse out of the barn without spooking it. But then he left in the middle of the night, no note, just a pile of laundry and a coffee mug with his initials on the bottom.
I’d told myself a hundred times that it was for the best. That I had nothing to offer him except a mattress that sagged in the middle and a body held together by trauma and duct tape.
