Will never be here again.
The fury has no place to land. The one man I want to grab and shake, the one I need to make answer for why he never said a word, is in the ground where I lowered him. So my anger, my pain, sprays sideways.
Onto a stranger.
Onto her.
That’s the ugly shape of it. I’ve been hunting for somebody to blame since the morning Jesse’s father called. She walked up my steps, wearing his chin and leading his dog. Some part of me took one look and picked her to pour my hate into.
“He didn’t calm me either.” The words don’t soften the blow, but they’re the truth. “He made his choice without us.”
“Because he knew we’d talk him out of it.” Her voice cracks for a microsecond before she catches herself. She’s not the kind to show weakness in front of a stranger. Not that I’ve given her any reason to trust me with anything.
She’s not the one who failed him. I know that. I knew it before the sentence cleared my teeth.
I just can’t make the grief care.
Jesse is in every board of this place.
He’s in the height of the feed bins, set for a man six-three. The crooked sign he wouldn’t let me straighten. The drop latch on the supply room he rigged from a horseshoe because he liked the sound it made.
I built this place with him, stud by stud, and now I can’t walk it without him narrating in my head, and I’d give the whole mountain to make the narration stop.
Or to never have it stop. I haven’t decided which is worse.
The woman follows me into the warm dark of the barn and stops like she’s hit a wall.
Jason is on the cot by the tack room. It’s where he sleeps when the weather turns, and the noise in his head gets loud. He’s got a barn cat on his chest and a paperback tented on his knee, and an entire bunkhouse to call his own. But this is where he chooses to sleep.
When the door lets the cold in, he comes up off the pillow fast, hands already moving, eyes already gone somewhere with sand in them.
“It’s me.” I keep my voice flat and low, the voice for spooked things. “Storm’s in. You’re at the Peak. Cat’s got your spot.”
He blinks. The room comes back into his eyes by degrees. “Doc.” A breath. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
He clocks Bella then, and his whole body asks me a question.
“Jesse’s cousin.” I make the introduction before I’ve decided whether to soften it or not. “Up from the city. She’ll be gonewhen the pass clears. Until then, she’s bunking in Je—the spare room in the clinic.” I’m not as good at not letting my voice crack as Jesse’s cousin. The grief hits when it hits and there’s shit I can do about it.
Bella doesn’t flinch atgone.She crosses to Jason like the distance is nothing, and sticks out a cold hand. “Bella.”
“Jason.” He shakes it. Watches her the way he watches everyone, for the tell, for the angle. He doesn’t find one. The not-finding shows on him. “You’re the one Jesse never shut up about.”
The room goes very still.
She holds it together better than I do. “He told you about me?”
“Bell this, Bell that.” Jason almost smiles. It costs him. “Told me you talk people off ledges for a living. Told me if it ever got bad enough, he’d put me on a bus south and you’d patch me up.” The almost-smile goes out. “Never gave me a last name, though. Never a number. Kept you somewhere safe, I figure.”
Kept us in separate pockets.Her words from the clinic, coming back at me out of a wounded man’s mouth. They land on her like a second loss.
So Jessedidtalk about her. To Jason. To the dogs, probably.
He talked about her to everyone but me.
It should land like vindication. It lands like robbery.
