My grandmother's ring. Yellow gold band, worn smooth by fifty-seven years on her finger.
Texas turquoise the color of pale sky with a vein of brown running through it.
My grandfather put it on her hand outside a courthouse in San Saba in 1967.
It's smaller than I remembered. Dakota's hands are smaller than my grandmother's were.
I close the box and slip it into the pocket of my jeans
Dakota stirs in the bedroom. So I start making coffee.
She comes out a few minutes later in nothing but my t-shirt and sleep-soft eyes. "Morning, baby."
"Morning. Coffee?"
"Yeah."
I bring her a mug. She sits at the kitchen table and drinks it slowly. The morning light's coming up gold through the window, and her hair is catching it. I smile because she has no idea what I'm about to do to her in the next twelve hours.
"Walk with me, baby."
"Where?"
"Big barn."
She tilts her head. "Why?"
"I want to show you something."
She doesn't ask what. She gets dressed—jeans, boots, one of my flannels over my t-shirt.
I take her hand. We walk across the gravel toward the big barn at the back of the property.
The cicadas haven't started. The dogs at the kennel are quiet. The May morning is the kind of cool that'll burn off in an hour.
I take her up the ladder of the hayloft. She climbs after me. I haul her up the last rung and we stand in the loft with the morning light coming through the slats of the corrugated roof in long yellow bars.
She knows what this place is. "Spur."
"You know what this place is, baby."
"Yeah."
"He stood right here. He took a picture of me kissing the top of your head and he sent it to your phone."
"I know."
"I want this place back."
She looks at me. Her hair's loose from the climb. The light is across her shoulders and her throat.
"How?"
I cross the loft, put my hand on the back of her neck, pull her against me. "Like this."
I kiss her. Hard. The kiss I've been holding back.
She kisses me back, hands in my hair, body pressed against me, the loft warm and smelling like hay and sun-warmed wood and the woman I love.
