"Pass the sugar."
He slides the sugar across the table. "You're going to have to say something eventually, Cade."
"Eventually is a word."
"It's a word that means 'later today,' my friend. Her truck's due around eight. Phantom's gonna have a whole breakfast thing at the main house. Marlena's making something. I think sausage gravy, biscuits, and a boatload of bacon. Cal will be crawling on somebody's boots. Grace is bringing Waylon as long as his face isn't a ruined thing. You’re gonna be there."
"I've got horses."
"You always have horses."
"One of them specifically isn’t taking a halter. Needs more training."
"That one hasn’t been taking a halter for six weeks. He can continue on for another hour while you eat breakfast with all of us."
I don't answer. I stir sugar into a coffee that's past the point where sugar will help.
Shadow studies me. I don't look up. I knowwhathe's looking at.
He's been looking at it for the last eight years and he's never once put a name on it out loud, which is one of the reasons he is, and has always been, my best friend.
"Spur."
"Yeah."
"She's grown."
My jaw works. I clock it doing it. Tell it to stop. It doesn't.
"I know," I say.
Shadow finishes his coffee, stands, and pats my shoulder on his way to the door.
He doesn't say anything else. He doesn't have to, but he pauses in the doorway for a split second before he leaves.
* * *
I hear her truck before I see it.
I'm on the porch of the bunkhouse with a second cup of coffee I don't need, watching the compound come alive.
Thunder up at the main barn. One of the prospects on a bucket outside the meat locker with a clipboard.
A heeler puppy I don't know the name of lying in a patch of sun that isn't fully sun yet.
Then the sound.
Diesel. Too loud for the hour.
Coming up the gravel from the county road the way a truck comes up gravel when the driver knows every dip and doesn't feel the need to ease through any of them.
She crests the hill at the gate and lays on the horn.
Three honks. Short. Clean.
The same pattern she's used since I’ve been around, coming home from a barrel race in her daddy's borrowed truck.
My hand tightens around the mug.
