I’ve gotten very good at it.
I’ve walked past this woman at holidays, church, and at the 4th of July BBQ we don’t talk about, and I’ve done it with my hat down, my boots moving, and my body reporting nothing on the outside it is doing on the inside.
Eleven months ago I added a second thing I don't look at.
Her phone in her hand.
The way she thumbs to a screenshot before every run. The way her face goes quiet around her mother's name.
I’ve gotten good at not looking at that, too.
But this morning, on a porch in the cold, with a cup of coffee I don't want in a hand that tightened on it before I told it to.
I look.
She lifts her face.
Finds the porch without looking for it.
The way a woman finds a thing she knew the location of before she needed to.
Our eyes meet across forty feet of Texas dirt.
She doesn't smile and neither do I.
She holds me the way she held me in that clubhouse eight years ago. A moment too long.
The moment a woman holds a man when she's reminding him of something they both agreed not to remember.
Then she nods.
Small. Deliberate. A country nod. The nod that says,“I see you, cowboy, and I will be getting to you later”.
She turns to the trailer, opens the side door, and starts unloading her horse.
I stand on the porch, coffee going cold in my hand.
Somewhere behind the bunkhouse, past the barn, past the round pen where a mustang is standing at the rail that was six feet too far twenty minutes ago, I know without looking that the roan has walked up to the fence and put his nose through the rails.
A broken thing who can’t help but watch another broken thing gaze at the woman he's not allowed to have.
Welcome home, Dakota.
CHAPTER TWO
Dakota
One hour earlier…
I'm seventy-three miles from home when I pull off at the Valero outside Brady.
The sun is coming up over the scrub pine east of the highway.
Pink at the edge. The kind of pink that doesn't mean anything except that Texas is about to be another day.
I park at the pump. Don't cut the engine. Don't look at the phone on the passenger seat.
Jaeger shifts in the trailer behind me.
