and see the world.
There it was. More than I usually shared. The truth, stripped simple.
Dani:So you left?
Me:Joined the Marine Corp.
Haven’t been back since.
Dani:Was your family
okay with that?
I stared at the blinking cursor. Seventeen years weighing heavily in my mind.
Me:No.
I didn’t leave home because I hated it. That’s what people always assumed.
I stayed longer than most young kids do before running off to the service. I was twenty before I left for boot camp, and it waslong enough to know exactly what life on that farm would look like if I stayed. I was supposed to want.
And for a while, I did.
I loved the horses. The rhythm of riding. The way the world narrowed down to breath, movement, and muscle. There was peace in that.
I was supposed to take all of that over. Same as every man before me, but somewhere along the way, I realized I didn’t want to die in that small town. Didn’t want my whole life decided before I had a chance to choose it.
So I left.
I was the first in generations to walk away, and sometimes I wonder if they still see me as a traitor to the land.
I sat there for a moment thinking about the farm, about my family, about the fact that I hardly knew anything about them. And after a few minutes, I realized I hadn’t received a response from Dani. It was a few more minutes before her name lit up my phone.
I took me a moments to register that it was a call and I hesitated to answer. Not because I didn’t want to talk to her, but because I did, too much. Because something about hearing her voice felt riskier than reading words on a screen. The idea of her voice sent a pulse racing through my ear like a drum. Texts gave me space. Distance. A chance to keep things clipped and controlled.
A call didn’t.
It meant tone, pauses, the parts you couldn’t edit.
The phone buzzed again as I exhaled through my nose and answered. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Dani said, softly. “I know we were texting, but… that felt wrong. You know?”
I leaned back against the hotel headboard, staring at the ceiling. “Wrong how?”
“Like this deserved a voice,” she said. “Not bubbles on a screen.”
That did it. Straight through whatever defenses I still had up.
“Yeah,” I said after a beat. “Okay.”
There was a quiet stretch, and I could hear movement on her end, maybe her pacing, maybe just settling somewhere comfortable. She had a way of filling silence without crowding it.
“So,” she said gently, “tell me about Tennessee.”
I scrubbed a hand over my jaw. “Not much to tell.”
She hummed, clearly unimpressed. “That’s not really an answer.”
