By Grace and her eyebrow.
By Phantom and his quiet warning.
By the prospect who keeps walking past Dakota like a moth at a porch light.
By her. Always by her.
Eight years. That’s how long I’ve been standing at fences watching things I can’t touch.
I was so young and naive the first time I saw her.
She was standing in the clubhouse doorway with the light behind her, and she looked at me, and I looked at her, andsomething in my chest did a thing it had never done before and has never stopped doing since.
Phantom saw it. I know he saw it because his hand landed on my shoulder three seconds later—not hard, not threatening, just present.
The weight of a father’s hand on the shoulder of a man who just looked at his daughter wrong. Or right. Depending on who you ask.
I’ve spent eight years making sure he never saw it again.
Austin. Abilene.
Every horse sale and clinic and out-of-town job I could find when the word came down that Dakota was coming home.
I mapped my life around her absence. Built my schedule around the gaps where she wasn’t.
Became the man who was always somewhere else when she walked in, because the alternative was being the man who stayed and let his face say the thing his mouth couldn’t.
And now she’s home. And she stood three feet from me and asked when does it stop, and I didn’t answer because the answer is god damn grenade.
It doesn’t stop.
It hasn’t stopped.
Years of wanting her from a distance.
Years of running.
Eleven months of her mother’s death redrawing every line in this family. A death she doesn’t know about.
A fucking death the club hid from her.
One homecoming where she stood close enough to touch, and I kept my hands on a beer bottle because putting them anywhere else would have ended everything.
The mustang drops his head. An inch. Maybe two. The first time he’s lowered his guard in my presence.
I watch him do it. One broken thing recognizing another.
“Yeah,” I say. To the horse. To the dark. To nobody. “I know the feeling.”
I push off the fence and walk back toward the fire pit.
I don't know why. The smart thing is the bunkhouse. The smart thing is boots off, hat on the hook, door closed.
But the coals are still glowing and there are a few brothers left at the table and she's still out here somewhere, and I amsogoddamn tired of being smart.
I grab a water from the cooler. Lean against the fence post. Same spot as before.
When does it stop?
