“If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
He holds the doorway for just a beat longer, then the door closes softly behind him.
The house settles into silence around me. Not the silence of Vixen Falls, which always felt too familiar, too full of everything I was trying to outrun. This is different, wide open and completely new, the kind of silence that doesn’t ask anything of you.
Taking the photograph from the nightstand, I hold it for a long time. Framed and placed there by a man who understood, without being told, exactly what I needed when I walked through that door.
Carefully setting it back, I lie back on the bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to the faint sounds of the desert outside the glass.
“Ryan,” I whisper into the quiet. “If you can hear me, I love you. I miss you so much.”
The ceiling doesn’t answer.
But somehow, for the first time in a long time, the silence feels a little less empty than it had before.
Chapter Eight
TATE
Two ribeye steaks are on the counter. Standing there for a second, I look at them before opening the marinade.
For years, I’ve cooked for one, a single man who appreciated his own company and didn’t particularly miss the alternative. Now and then, one of my brothers shows up, and I throw something extra on the grill, but most nights it’s just Memphis, me, the desert, and the quiet. After a full day at the clubhouse, coming home to the silence of this place is exactly what I need.
Grabbing the steaks, I head outside to the grill. The desert air wraps around me, warm still, but cooled slightly now that the sun has dropped behind the mountains, the heat of the day releasing itself slowly into the darkening sky. My backyard stretches out into nothing but sand, rock, and open space.
No neighbors or traffic, just silence and sky.
Exactly how I like it.
Firing up the grill, I lay the steaks down with a loud, satisfying sizzle. The smoke and the smell of seasoned meat rise immediately into the night air. While they cook, I watch the horizon shift, orange bleeding into purple, Vegas glittering faintly in the far distance like something from another world entirely.
Turning, I look back through the large glass windows into the house. The hallway light is still glowing, the one I’d left on in case Sophia woke up and needed to find her way out. Her door sits at the end of the hallway, closed and still.
Looking at it a second longer than necessary, I mutter, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
Tracker’s woman is asleep just down the hall. The promise I’d made to my brother sits heavy on my shoulders, the way it always does when the noise falls away.
Flipping the steaks, I listen to them hiss against the grates.
Tracker had always been the one on the grill when we were younger, back when we were still at home with Mom, back before the clubs, back before life got complicated, heavy, and full of things that couldn’t be undone. He’d stand at that old backyard grill with a beer in one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, completely in his element, talking too much and laughing too loud the way he always did.
‘You’re flipping it too early,’ he used to say whenever I tried to take over, that grin already spreading across his face before the words were even out.
I can still hear it, clear as anything.
“Shut up,” I mutter up at the sky and feel a smirk pull at the corner of my mouth despite everything.
The steaks cook slowly as the night deepens around me.
Heading back inside, I grab two clean plates from the kitchen. Two, not one, and when I come back out, Memphis has appeared from wherever he’d spent his evening, padding toward me across the warm stone with that unhurried ease of his, like he’d simply decided it was time to come home, and so here he was.
Pulling the steaks off the grill, I let them rest while I stare out into the desert.
The emptiness that usually settles over me at this hour isn’t there tonight. And I know exactly why.
Rubbing the back of my neck, I look down at Memphis.
