There's a knock at the cabin door. Spur stands and crosses to the door to open it.
Pops is on the porch. Banshee behind him.
Both of their faces have the serious expression like when church is about to be called, and Pops looks past Spur at me on the couch.
He doesn't speak for a long second. "Baby girl."
"Pops."
"I’m calling church. You wanna come to the main house and sit with the ladies?"
"Yeah, Pops.” I close my eyes.
Spur looks at me.
"Go," I tell him. "I'm not going anywhere. I can head over and sit with Marlena and Grace."
Pops nods once. "And the prospects I have watchin’ all of you."
Spur kisses the top of my head and walks out behind Banshee.
I walk to the main house with two prospects ten feet behind me.
Marlena's at the front door before I reach the porch.
She doesn't ask if I'm okay. She knows I'm not.
She holds the door open. "Come on, baby. Grace put coffee on."
I let myself walk into the kitchen of the house I grew up in.
Grace is at the table with two mugs already poured and a third one going.
Cal asleep on a quilt on the floor. Waylon asleep on the couch with his thumb in his mouth.
The Lyle women at one table. The Lyle men in church.
The man who tried to kill me somewhere in the state of Texas.
He doesn't know what he just walked into.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Spur
I leave Dakota on the back porch of the main house with Marlena's arm around her shoulders and a coffee in her hand she's not drinking, and I walk to the clubhouse with Phantom on my left and Banshee on my right.
It's been two hours since we pulled through the gate of Sharp.
Two hours of Dakota in Marlena's kitchen with Grace pouring coffee and the whole property holding its breath while Phantom let his daughter settle before he called church.
The property is dark except for the porch lights at the main house and the floodlight at the barn.
The cicadas are loud the way they get loud when the air still hasn't cooled from the afternoon heat, and I can smell the mesquite smoke off Banshee's clothes from the patrol fire he kept going at the round pen tonight.
None of us talks for the first stretch of the walk.
Phantom breaks it as we're crossing the gravel between the main house and the clubhouse path. "How is she?"
