Atme.
“She’s a grown woman, Spur.”
The shift is so fast I almost miss it.
One second we’re talking about Lockharts and rescue networks and the next we’re talking about the only thing that actually matters.
I know who he means. He knows I know.
“Yes, Prez.”
“That doesn’t change anything.”
“No, Prez.”
The time since we’ve done the unspeakable weighs between us.
Jolene’s death—the woman who supposedly ‘left’, the text message, the ruse we’ve all kept up.
Neither of us says her name. Jolene’s.
We don’t. The club doesn’t.
The empty space where she used to stand has been paved over with silence, protocol, and the kind of collective amnesia that happens when a family needs to protect itself.
Phantom looks back at the mustang.
His jaw is set. The firelight from the dying pit catches the side of his face and I see it—the tiredness he doesn’t show at the table, the weight he carries when the crown isn’t visible, the cost of being the man who holds everything together while his own life sits in pieces he doesn’t let anyone help him pick up.
“Keep working the horse,” he says. Quieter now.
“Yes, Prez.”
He pushes off the rail, walks back toward the clubhouse.
His boots on the gravel and the sound gets smaller while I stay at the pen.
* * *
It could be midnight. Maybe later.
The fire is coals. The compound is quiet—the Texas quiet that isn’t silence but is the absence of human noise, filled instead with crickets, wind, and the distant hum of the highway and the occasional shift of a horse in a stall.
I’m still at the fence. I should sleep. IknowI should sleep.
I’ve got the mustang at dawn and three rescues that need ground work, plus a farrier appointment for the paint mare’s front left that’s been bothering me for a week.
Tomorrow starts in five hours and I’m standing at a round pen in the dark staring at a horse that won’t look at me.
The mustang is at the far rail. Same spot. Same posture—ears forward now, not pinned, which is something.
Progress measured in the angle of an ear. The incremental work of trust.
He looks at me. Across the pen, in the dark, the mustang turns his head and looks at me. Holds it. Two seconds. Three.
I feel seen by everything tonight.
By the horse who’s deciding whether I’m safe.
